Practising Feminist Political Ecologies: Moving Beyond the ‘Green Economy’ 9781350221970, 9781783600878

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FIGURES

1.1 Gendered household and community resources in Pananao, Dominican Republic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 1.2 Gender and division of land use units, Kathama-Machakos District, Kenya . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 1.3 Gender division of plants and products . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 1.4 Gendered multiple use of landscape niches and trees in Fakot Village, Tehri Garhwal District, in the Lower Himalaya . . . . . 48 5.1 Towards a lived feminist political ecology approach: a woman in south-eastern Turkey accesses water from an irrigation canalet for home use . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 9.1 Representation of social movement University A . . . . . . . 274 9.2 Representations of social movement Universities B and C . . . 275 10.1 ‘Ecology?’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 288 10.2 ‘This is not a gender binary’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 290 10.3 ‘Khak tu sare’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301 10.4 ‘Queer ecology conversation’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307

ACKNO­W LEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) and Hivos, for their support in organizing and sponsoring the Col­loquium on ‘Bodies, Technologies and Resources: Deepening Conversations on Gender and the Green Economy’ as part of the Environmental Studies Colloquium series ‘Critical Engagements with the Green Economy’ held at ISS on 19 and 20 November 2012. We would in particular like to thank the participants at the colloquium: Giovanna Di Chiro (Swarthmore College, USA), Bina di Costa (Australian National University, Australia), Leila Harris (University of British Colombia, Canada),
Khawar Mumtaz (Shirkat Gah, Pakistan),
 Anita Nayar (DAWN, India), Andrea Nightingale (University of Gothenburg, Sweden), Barbara Oliveira (Fundação Getulio Vargas-FGV/EAESP, Brazil), Dianne Rocheleau (Clark University, USA),
Atila Roque (Amnesty International, Brazil),
Josine Stremmelaar (Hivos, the Netherlands), Eva van der Sleen (Hivos, the Netherlands), Yvonne Underhill-Sem (University of Auckland, New Zealand),
Catherine Walsh (Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar, Ecuador) and Christa Wichte­ rich (University of Kassel and WIDE+, Germany), as well as the members of the ISS staff and PhD students who attended. We would also like to acknowledge the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, the Leir Charitable Foundations and the Leir Luxembourg Program-Clark University, which hosted earlier meetings leading to the production of the book. In the process of putting the book together we greatly benefited from the generous support of two ISS research programmes: ‘Political Economy of Resources, Environment and Population’ (PER) and ‘Civic Innovation Research Initiative’ (CIRI), which allowed us to join Kathy Gibson and members of the community economies collective in Bolsena, Italy, during the summer of 2013 and for us to come together once more at ISS in June 2014. Finally we would like to thank our friends and colleagues: Sabrina Aguiari, Bram Büscher, Veronica Davidov, Natalie Koch, Lise Nelson, Carol Hunsberger, Loes Keysers, Rosalba Icaza and Max Spoor for their encouragement, friendship and mentoring throughout the process. Wendy Harcourt and Ingrid Nelson (10 August 2014)

INTRODUCTION: ARE WE ‘GREEN’ YET ? AND THE VIOLENCE OF ASKING SUCH A QUESTION

Wendy Harcourt and Ingrid L. Nelson

Encountering shared histories The immediate impetus for this book comes from the moment when both of us joined the academe at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University, The Hague.1 Our work connects activism, policy and academe, albeit in different ways. The origins of the book go back years to the advocacy, joint research and personal connections among some of the authors, particularly linked to Wendy Harcourt’s work in international policy and research and Ingrid Nelson’s connection with feminist political ecology (FPE) activist academics. The book came out of several historical processes. The wider background to the book is feminist engagement in creating connections and knowledge on environment, gender and feminism at an international level. Put simply the book attempts to address the gap between ‘gender and development’ and feminist issues focused on human rights, economy, environment and violence against women, as well as exploring the queering of development and environment and links to sexuality and technology. From our observations (and engagement), whereas there were earlier books and debates by activist scholars on feminism, environment and development in the early 1990s around the UN Conference on Environment and Development, in the last two decades the issue of environment fell out of the gender and development arena of concern. International-level sustainable development agendas sidelined gender and environment as technical and an add-on interest, even as academics published important analyses. In particular the book Feminist Political Ecology, edited by Dianne Rocheleau, Barbara Thomas-Slayter and Esther Wangari (1996), served as a founding text for thinking through gender politics and feminist theory in environmental projects and among impoverished communities working for grounded environmental protection and knowledge and against

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bureaucratic and modernist approaches to environmental protection programmes (Rocheleau and Nirmal 2015). In the early 2000s, for a variety of reasons (Harcourt 2009), many feminists working in justice movements decided to split from the UN as a pivotal point of reference, with many gravitating towards the movement-based World Social Forum (WSF) (Desai forthcoming; Vargas 2005). During the mid-2000s, around the WSF processes, academic work on feminist political ecology converged with a resurgence of interest and questions about feminism, economy and ecology in the context of the current ‘green economy’ debate, which became a buzzword eroding sustainable development in an increasingly neoliberal world. Several of the authors included in this book met at the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation in Uppsala, Sweden, in 2008 to revisit FPE in light of the need to resume academic and movement work. At the Uppsala meeting Wendy Harcourt proposed writing an edited book to be published by Zed – which had approached her with the idea of a gender and environment series. Of the participants at the Uppsala meeting, only Dianne Rocheleau, Giovanna Di Chiro and Wendy Harcourt contributed to this current book. Others in Uppsala contributed to subsequent meetings and writings, but then, in the end, were not able to contribute to this book. The road since the Uppsala meeting has been a long one involving meetings in New York, Luxembourg, Bolsena and The Hague, and involving other sometimes complementary and sometimes conflicting writing, teaching and policy-related activities. In this six-year process it was difficult to work with the urgency of activist and advocacy agendas, and at the same time to find the space and time to deepen reflective academic analysis. The sense of what counted as an outcome – a good conversation, a policy brief, a book, an advocacy strategy, sharing information, personal connections, research proposals and institutional recognition – became divisive. Other questions also dogged the process, such as: who had the authority to speak and for whom, what were the priorities, what processes ensured validity of the conversations, how could diverse people from different contexts build continuity and even friendships without excluding others. We enjoyed the food, the conversations, the fun and the environment – whether it was the snow in Nordic forests or lakes in central Italian sun (Harcourt 2012). However, as often occurs in long and underfunded processes, the dynamics in the

introduction  |   3 group changed as participants lost jobs and loved ones, moved on to other spaces, and new priorities crowded in. The question in all of these conversations has continually been about finding space and time to reflect as well as to keep continuity and to decide where to invest the energy of individuals, not all of whom felt they could act collectively coming from such different terrains. This book finally took shape through the academic terrain of ISS. The last event leading to the book occurred in The Hague at the ISS in November 2012. On the occasion of the publication of Women Reclaiming Sustainable Livelihoods (ibid.) the ISS and Hivos (a Dutch humanist foundation) contributed funds to invite people to consider the issue of gender and the green economy in the wake of the twenty-year review of the Rio Summit (Rio+20). Together with Josine Stremmelaar and Eva van der Sleen of Hivos, we organized the meeting ‘A Colloquium on Bodies, Technologies and Resources: Deepening conversations on gender and the green economy’ as one of two ‘gender’ colloquiums in a series on the green economy during the 2012/13 academic year.2 The colloquium built on several issues in the most recent discussions around FPE. We were able to bring together academic activists who normally converse on- and offline in different networks, including those from Uppsala, with a network of feminists publishing on the new FPE in academic journals. The debate held at the ISS over two days examined current ecological and economic crises and their impacts on diverse genders and the communities and ecologies where they live. Although conceived in the wake of Rio+20, the discussion moved well beyond the current policy debates on the green economy to look at colonial history and literatures on decoloniality, and how to link concerns around cultural violence, queer movements, activism, technology, teaching practices and environmental justice. The debate revealed how different women’s organizations and networks within and outside environmentalist movements are rethinking economies and lifestyles and in the process redefining how we can live collectively sharing and understanding our common ‘naturecultures’. The debate looked at how specific practices linking life, nature and gender in particular sites – for example, ‘buen vivir’ – travel beyond their birthplaces to sites of current global environmental struggles such as high-level UN panels, the Rio+20 meetings, the kitchens and farms of the Slow Food movement and the woodlands of Mozambique.

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For example, contributor Catherine Walsh (see Chapter 3) expressed concern about how activists outside the Andes quickly appropriated ‘buen vivir’, which comes from a very specific cultural context and worldview of the Andes. Which elements of ‘buen vivir’ are lost in translation as ‘buen vivir’ travels to new sites and contexts? Appropriation can force practices into contexts that would be reprehensible from the perspective of those who initially gave life to a cosmovision. There are also worries about academics and others extracting ‘buen vivir’ as a tool or object as one might extract and exploit a rare plant’s genetic information. Gifting and sharing diverse worldviews are important acts in FPE, but such practices can transform into practices of appropriation or exchange for exclusive benefit such as with intellectual property claims. How can and does ‘buen vivir’ travel, what does it do and when is it ethical to take inspiration from ‘buen vivir’ as an example, and when does it become appropriated or a stolen technical object? Sacha Knox raises a similar point (Chapter 10) when she queries the use of Ubuntu by foreigners eager to appro­priate an ‘African’ cosmovision. The question we want to raise here is: in what way do specific cosmovisions or practices travel and what are their effects as they move to new contexts? Given the interest and engagement in the two-day colloquium, we revived the idea of the Zed book and participants were invited to continue the discussions by contributing their papers, conversations or new work inspired by the event that we have now gathered together in this collected volume. Having provided a short history of the book we situate the book in the current discussion on FPE, highlighting what we see as the book’s contributions to FPE ‘in process’ before turning to a discussion of how we are ‘staying with the troubles’ (Haraway 2007). And how we understand that ‘Response-ability is staying with the knots, staying with the trouble, inheriting the damages and the achievements … Getting at “loss” is a part of response-ability’ (Haraway 2013, quoted in Di Chiro’s Chapter 7). Where we situate the book In The Hague ISS colloquium and in the title of the book we highlight ‘the green economy’ as one of the entry points into current discussions about feminist political ecology and environmental justice movements. This is the broader and current political context and

introduction  |   5 discourse in which we are living our lives. While Christa Wichterich in Chapter 2 presents a strong critique of the green economy policy discourse, the broader aim of the book is not to support or engage directly in the theory or policy on the green economy. We aim to speak instead about what these discussions on ‘the green economy’ mean and do in our own and in others’ lives. We aim to look at issues such as climate change in a way that moves the discussion away from climate scare talk – with deceptively simple charts and graphs and scientific explanations that ignore people, power and gender – and away from engaging life and the Earth in silos of ‘energy’, ‘water’, ‘agriculture’, etc., as if they are not connected. We take climate change and other urgent issues seriously, but we are critical of analyses and approaches that, as Nelson argues in Chapter 4, create ready spaces for heroes or saviours to assume the authority to intervene in addres­sing environmental issues. Playing and assuming an expert role measures individuals and communities against visions of environment and well-being that are not of their own making. This can be a form of violence and a perpetuation of colonizing practices. At the same time, we are trying as feminists and environmentalist advocates not to repeat populist journalism, NGO or activist campaigns that perpetuate harmful and essentialist images of women as victims of climate change or of defiled landscapes with the people who inhabit them depicted as the primary culprits of ecological damage. We are uncomfortable with how these images erase women’s histories and lives. We feel that while women do experience changes/ disasters differently it is not because they are women per se, but rather because of the structural inequalities they endure, and those pictures and broader narratives silence their voices, knowledge and lived experiences. A wealth of well-written work by feminists and environmentalists that engages a diverse audience on creative as well as academic and feminist political levels also influences our work.3 This includes the process of writing the book as provoked by the critical lens of queer ecology and queer theory and the challenge of decolonizing our own minds. As we wrote together and met in different places in the process, we managed to thrive with reflective and responsive emails, and through face-to-face conversations full of those elusive but rejuvenating ‘ah!’ moments. As we seek out lurking and lingering questions and concerns we practise building an epistemic community

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that can break out of dominant ways of thinking about environments, economies and societies. Connecting insights, contentions and conversations In going beyond the green economy discourse the book sets out current FPE analysis of multi-sited ecological and economic crises and their impacts on diverse genders and the communities and eco­ logies where they live. The contributing authors explore and ‘trouble’ through these themes in connection with their lives. What emerges from all of the chapters is a sense of modest concern about our own positionality and situated knowledge as we stay with the troubles and sense of discomfort around our different activities in everyday life, whether in our roles as teachers, researchers or activists, and where all of those roles overlap. We are building our understanding of FPE as process from our engagement, our encounters and our embodied learning and praxis. While we realize there are bodily limits to knowing or understanding certain specific issues (such as formulating theories/ strategies for living on this planet under climatic conditions never experienced before), our collective aim is to open up the space to learn through the body and other epistemologies and cosmovisions, recognizing that this form of knowledge has been suppressed by Western approaches to scientific inquiry. All of us are interested in what decoloniality has to say in this regard as it challenges hegemonic knowledge, production and exchange. Our interest in decoloniality is the reason we have taken on naturecultures, post-humanism, emotions and performance of feminism and environmentalism, as ways to challenge ourselves as we rethink and search for cracks and fissures in identities, dualisms, living with other species, landscapes and sense of scale. Staying with the troubles This edited collection is the fruit of scholars and activists who for the last two years have laboured, in all too familiar hunched positions, in front of their computer screens, struggling not only with writing but also with deep and contradictory emotional responses to the world we are living in and experiencing. One of these emotional contradictions is recognizing that the authors gathered here are not able to represent all positions and voices. The desire to represent others is something we continue to unlearn through our different

introduction  |   7 generational, professional and other experiences. These and other embodied emotions inform much of this book. As we wrote our chapters based on our shared environmental justice goals we inevitably imagined particular desired future worlds of environmental and social being. Following Donna Haraway’s (1989) idea of situated knowledge, such acts of imagining ‘green’ or ‘just’ futures come from the privileges, status and other features of the individual or community doing the imagining. Who within particular environmental, feminist and justice movements asserts which imagined futures? Whose voices are silent or silenced in these visions and goals? The elephant in the room is not who has the ‘agency’ to speak but who has the authority to speak – global South, global North, young, old, woman, man, white, black? For example, in Chapter 1 Dianne Rocheleau presents the paradox of feeling ‘simultaneously called to witness and report, yet forbidden on the basis of race and colonial legacy’. She describes the awkward moment of sharing findings from her research in Kenya as part of the launch of the co-authored Feminist Political Ecology book (1996) with Barbara Thomas-Slayter and Esther Wangari, which she had thought would be a celebration of the fact that such findings were finally entering and debunking problematic academic political ecology discussions and theories that ignore women’s ‘agency, innovation and success’, among their day-to-day challenges. But women who identified with the ‘borrowed or donated stories’ in the book expressed anger at the thought that they might have to cite the book when writing about its themes, which were stories that they had known from direct experience. That difficult but necessary confrontation prevented Rocheleau from writing a second book in the way that she had imagined. Acknowledging and then addressing the effects of privilege is important in order to be open to (and subjected to) the challenge about our viewpoints and to work out ways to build connections and shared visions across differences and in the process to question our positioning of privilege. This move, begun by decolonial and post-colonial scholars (such as Lugones 2008 and Mohanty 2003), opens up possibilities for becoming something and someone different – rooted in place and history – and connected to envisioning alternative futures with and among broader communities. There are, however, significant limits to one’s own abilities to recognize patterns in our behaviour and

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discourse within our various academic communities and movements. We may inadvertently ignore or fail to speak about an important daily practice because it seems ‘we already know this’ because ‘we do this every day’. Indeed, perhaps we do not speak about certain obvious practices for fear that we might perpetuate a stereotype or come to be seen as banal, everyday or obvious ourselves. By calling attention to such awkward and telling moments we focus on the frictions that have led to deep divisions within inter­ national feminism and environmentalism around the divides of North/ South, academic/activist and generation. We recognize that there is an unstated privilege enjoyed by those (for example, Northern-based white environmentalists) who can ignore the injustices produced by and within ‘justice’ and environmental movements.4 So we begin immediately by asking, ‘With what sort of “troubling”, “risk” and “loss” can FPE engage in terms of our emotions, energies and other efforts to unpack privilege?’ Do we draw attention to these divisive issues or do we and our readers prefer that we sweep them under the carpet, given that feminist, environmental and decolonial theorizing and activism still occupy a relatively marginalized position in global conversations about environment and the economy? Our question is rhetorical, but it challenges ourselves and our readers to keep in mind who gets to speak and what types of practices and forms of speaking and doing get performed. There are many corporations, bureaucrats and other ‘experts’ who are in a position to calculate our level of green achievement for us, using metrics defined within a globalized and neoliberal economic system. In the face of these technocratic practices, feminist political ecologists offer counter-visions to powerful problematic framings of justice and ‘green economics’. Right from the outset, we want to acknowledge that in making our counter-assertions, we too run the risk of producing our own set of violences, of worlding and imagining that marginalizes others. Indeed, as the conversation involving Larissa Barbosa da Costa, Rosalba Icaza and Angélica Ocampo in Chapter 9 and other chapters in the book attest, marginalization is part of the problematic history of the emergence of many social, environmental and feminist movements. While we analyse our research, family and life experiences and try to practise alternative ‘counter’-visions we are aware first that these attempts are partial and always in a state of becoming – we can never

introduction  |   9 be fully ‘green’ or ‘just’ or escape contradictions. And secondly, we are aware of the frustrations and difficulties of being or acting in a world that already feels so violent, and is so threatened. We have chosen different ways to express how we live and practise feminist political ecology – through stories, narratives and analysis from many different parts of the world. The group has come together through the different networks and connections of the two editors, but what is driving all of us is the desire to engage in just processes of change as feminists and ecologists, while at the same time being acutely aware of the ‘burden’, potential impacts and the non-impacts that we carry as writers and practitioners. By ‘burden’ we mean our (and others’) uncomfortable histories, realities and memories that inform our critical praxis in decolonial projects, in anti-racism, in feminism and in environmentalism. Readers may well ask why we want to make such disclosures from the outset. Would development policy experts take the extra time to read a nuanced development  report rather than a carefully crafted bullet-point summary? Why is it that such experts require so much scaling ‘down’ of complexity in reports while they demand that research results be scalable ‘up’ into development tools that erase the very ecological, historical and political variations that will make or break the success of such decontextualized tools? In which moments do justice movements stop and assess their own internal contradictions and injustices? It is precisely by recognizing and exploring such discomforting questions that we ‘stay with the troubles’, as Haraway asks positioned actors to do. We know that a broad audience might want a nicely presented set of arguments and descriptions that say, ‘Here you are, check these boxes and you will do environmental justice better now that you know what feminism, anti-racism and ageism are about.’ But this book aims to examine the contradictions and the emotional and embodied ­struggles by sharing different conversations and insights into the praxis of ‘­doing’ FPE as a way to guide our collective a­ ction and collaboration in the future as we move towards our visions of environmental justice. We feel that FPE is a process of doing environmentalism, justice and feminism differently. The following section provides our particular take on the troubles that we as editors see as connecting insights, contentions and conversations among the book’s contributing authors. There can be many other ways of seeing the tensions and connections. We have chosen

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not to dwell on arguments that we and the other authors generally tend to support; rather we emphasize some of the ‘troubles’ within and beyond FPE today where we would like to invite further conversation, research and ways of practising FPE. We share many concerns, but not a normative logic, and we hope that this opens up possibilities for practising FPE in the present disturbing ‘green economy’ context. Trouble 1: Challenging neoliberal logic and narrow analyses of neoliberalism

TAMA (there are many alternatives) We are acutely aware of the fact that we are writing after the Rio+20 event, which saw the idea of ‘sustainable development’ being overtaken by the ‘green economy’. We argue that we need to question this green economy buzzword by retracing colonial and neoliberal histories and who practises them in the present and how. In Chapter 2, Wichterich illustrates how the neoliberal logic within both sustainable development and more intensely in the ‘green economy’ includes women and vulnerable groups as long as they perform ‘productive’ (moneymaking) tasks cheaply (efficiently). Just as we should be cautious about anything marketed or labelled as ‘green’ or ‘natural’, so too should we look carefully at what we celebrate or label as ‘empowerment’ or ‘inclusive of women and vulnerable groups’. Based on her insights grounded in her activism within transnational as well as European green, feminist and social movements, Wichterich argues that these dynamics are converging, particularly within multilateral negotiations on climate change and biodiversity conservation. As we listen to experts warn us of tipping points and climate and ecological disaster, this opens up spaces for technocratic or other new hero figures to swoop in and claim the authority to save others from a dire fate (see Nelson in Chapter 4) and to label others as not sufficiently resilient to save themselves unless they adopt new practices that fix them in a local place, accept the obliteration of government support and eviscerate their current strategies of mobility that draw on social as well as ecological diversity (see Nightingale in Chapter 6). Rather than wait around for a hero, or assume personal responsibility for fixing broader structural failures, or wait for a single ­con­sensus on how to completely transform society, Wichterich supports a TAMAprinciple approach (there are many alternatives) to intervening with multiple strategies, as neoliberal logics will infiltrate, co-opt and

introduction  |   11 instrumentalize new strategies through the practices of anyone from a young entrepreneur from Silicon Valley to a World Bank gender analyst. Care work, the commons and sufficiency (enough) are key sites of refusing or troubling these sorts of efficiency and growth logics, and they offer spaces for the TAMA principle to replace ‘green and leftist blueprints’ that dominate anti-capitalist responses to the ‘green economy’. Wichterich provides examples such as communities living near airports asserting their right to a restful sleep, babies having their own temporality of feeding that neoliberal intrusions should not interfere with, and demonstrating that speculative investments (e.g. gambling) in food crops and the life expectancy of residents in homes for the elderly are ecologically and morally untenable. We see connections here between the TAMA principle and the work on community economies by J. K. Gibson-Graham (1996, 2006, and Gibson-Graham et al. 2013). TAMA draws from activist and policy networks, while feminist community economy theories and practice draw heavily from theory and academic circles based on grounded collaborative research. Rocheleau (Chapter 1), Harris (Chapter 5), Di Chiro (Chapter 7) and Harcourt (Chapter 8) also critique neoliberal approaches to the green economy in ways that draw on Gibson-Graham and others, yet not explicitly ‘TAMA’. Di Chiro works with her students and community activists to co-create their course and community objectives and learning activities, and Harris counters neoliberal framings of water as a resource with everyday, embodied and emotional relations that mechanistic economic frameworks insufficiently engage. Harcourt highlights the labours of love that both neoliberal logics and social movements tend to sideline or forget, and Rocheleau narrates her multiple encounters and attempted subversion of neoliberal logics towards decolonial practice (while Walsh in Chapter 3 chooses not to cite Gibson-Graham, who still compose their approach from their positions in the ‘global North’). All of these authors share an emphasis on counter-hegemonies and knowledge-making but would not use the same terminologies or theories to achieve their goals, which extend well beyond merely critiquing neoliberal logic.

Neoliberalism: a convenient demon?  Scholars such as James Ferguson (2009) offer a challenging provocation to the extensive published activist and scholarly literature decrying neoliberalism. Beyond multiple

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ways of describing how neoliberal logics produce victims, Ferguson (ibid.: 167) draws on Foucault’s 1979 lectures on neoliberalism (2008) to argue for articulating what kinds of positive forms of power can be appropriated or taken up by ‘progressives’ by asking ‘what do we want?’ rather than listing everything that we do not want. Assuming that there is a coherent ‘we’ in the first place presumes an authority that Ferguson and other scholars repeatedly assume and presume. Many, though not all, feminist political ecologists question such an assumed ‘we’ from the outset. Another issue with this analysis is the assertion of a lack of articulating alternatives and ways of living and being and governing. Wichterich articulates alternatives through her focus on care and commoning and concepts such as ‘enough’, among the other contributors’ arguments listed above. An FPE analysis of neoliberal logic is more than merely anti-(fill in the blank), it is a process of developing new practices, some of which articulate new arts of governing, but do so without necessarily presuming or predetermining who ‘we’ are, as this is the situated and positional piece that requires careful analysis. FPE continues to articulate alternative forms of living and governing among one another through a different and more nuanced lens than an all-encompassing ‘progressive’ class narrative. One focus involves questions of how to sustain livelihoods. Trouble 2: Sustaining livelihoods, engaging technologies and queering ecologies

Sustaining livelihoods  Going beyond the green economy means that we have to  start from the level of everyday life, social reproduction and ongoing people’s struggles for gender-aware ecological and social justice. This means engaging our bodies, emotions, everyday practices and relationships. For example,  instead of ‘greening’ the economy we need to be ‘sustaining livelihoods’ to ensure nutrition, ecological balance, clean water, secure housing, gender equality, meaningful and diverse approaches to labour. The book points to some of the hopeful spaces in which FPE can contribute to ecological and social change which are not about broadening the green desires of the consumer market through green market products but rather about building just livelihoods and lifestyles. In Chapter 1, Rocheleau speaks to gender, livelihoods and power relations also present in research processes and what she describes

introduction  |   13 as: ‘The principle of gender complementarity under uneven relations of power and the importance of parallel institutions and domains of knowledge and authority (defined by gender, or by culture) carried forward into my own work “in the field” and into feminist political ecology in the academy.’ Harris (Chapter 5) argues for an extended ‘livelihoods’ or ‘lived feminist political ecology’ approach, attentive to everyday needs, embodied interactions and labours as well as emotional and affective relations with the environments and natures where we live. She moves away from livelihood approaches that are construed narrowly as focused on economic needs and income; instead she focuses on everyday interactions and embodiments and emotions. Nightingale (Chapter 6) shows the connections beyond one’s home and community that support and sustain livelihoods, but which become recrafted under different resilience frameworks in Scotland and Nepal. In Chapter 8, Harcourt considers the different embodied experiences and emotions in the conflictual interactions of the Punti di Vista community in the small town of Bolsena as different livelihood priorities of local farmers, the Catholic Church and the tourist industry can clash with environmental movements working for social justice. While FPE pays close attention to sustainable livelihoods and the problems of conflicting livelihoods, the issues of the role of new technologies and repurposing old technologies and learning to love strange ‘others’ remain a significant challenge within a livelihoods approach.

Engaging technologies The trialogue between Barbosa da Costa, Icaza and Ocampo in Chapter 9 examines approaches to sustaining acad­ ­ emic and activist livelihoods within a decolonizing project of learning and practising with others. They highlight creative uses of online technologies such as websites with Quechua, Spanish and English language content and new universities for practising alternative and indigenous education. They discuss three technologies of violence, however, including devices of torture used on women’s bodies, retro­ excavadoras or backhoes for extracting soil and resources and the extractive voice recorder device. Technologies are rarely categorically ‘bad’ or ‘good’. Their application and appropriation offer creative and abusive possibilities. FPE approaches various technologies with cautious curiosity and experimentation in coalition with others. In

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Chapter 3, Walsh recalls the process of officially recognizing ‘buen vivir’ and ‘pachemama’ in otherwise hostile ‘government’ realms and the ways that such recognition created opportunity for new modes of exploitation and asserted decolonial worldviews and practices. Rocheleau has subverted and appropriated technologies of mapping in her agroforestry work with significant care and reflection, as Da Costa, Icaza and Talero demonstrate with their conversation about the uses and abuses of the voice recorder. Cameras, social media platforms and other technologies all demand respect for and among others, and practising research and learning through coalition. In Chapter 8 Harcourt wonders aloud how we can live with these technological changes as she considers technocultures and questions whether we can grow to ‘love the hybrids we are creating’. She asks what to do with all the ‘nasty stuff’ and how to navigate the futures we are facing as we live FPE.

Queering ecologies These concerns come out further in conversations on queering ecologies. One common limitation of sustaining livelihoods and engagement with certain forms of technologies and the refusal of other extractive technologies is a tendency to refuse or exclude the ‘contaminated’, ‘exposed’ and other bodies that exist as a result of technologies deemed dangerous and repugnant from within sustainable livelihoods approaches. Queering ecologies asks FPE to examine how to build sustainable livelihoods and just movements that refuse violence and ecological devastation without also refusing the polluted, the abject, the hybrid seed infiltrated with GMO genes, and the exposed bodies and beings that we must learn not only to live with but to love (see Harcourt, Chapter 8, and Di Chiro 2003, 2010). The conversation in Chapter 10 among Harcourt, Knox and Tabassi explores differences among generations and identities when speaking about queering ecology. Harcourt writes that ‘Queer ecology helps us to move beyond that in looking at fluidity, movements across species, divisions of cells as life, technologies that show new possibilities of love, of healing, and of living with non-human others. At the same time there is a huge darkness – humanity is fast destroying environments, ourselves and others – militarism, fundamentalism, epidemic disease – climate change – inequalities that deepen, extractive violence against natureculture.’ Queer ecology, like FPE, is a way of doing/ thinking, but it can also provide sites of new markets and violence.

introduction  |   15 Wichterich’s chapter cautions us about the new international markets in clinical body work (women serving as surrogates, etc.) for queer men, which can be seen as extraordinary practices of reciprocity and queer living and community, but can also offer troubling spaces for new forms of consumerism (see Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 2010). Queering ecologies and cyborg perspectives challenge how we think of sustaining livelihoods and building new sustainable livelihoods, and we hope FPE continues to pursue these critical yet turbulent themes. Trouble 3: Appropriation and naming and claiming FPE

Telling others’ stories and the travels of rooted worldviews and prac­ tices  The different chapters explore specific sites of practice and ask: what are the ethics, possibilities and risks of worldviews and strategic rooted practices travelling beyond their originary contexts? We also ask, ‘what do we know and who are we’? The politics of presenting/ representing what is ‘known’ is something that intersectional thinking can help us work on in alignment with a broader decolonial project, and this has to do with the ideas of situated knowledge and positionality. All knowledge comes from somewhere, but we should not assume that we can see all that is to be known from within that somewhere. It is through conversation and articulation and staying with the troubles that multiple positionalities help generate richer, more complex theories and understandings beyond a simplistic and hierarchical God’s-eye view and ‘ground-up’ view. The question of disclosing/sharing/representing what is ‘known’ is complex. In her contribution, Walsh describes the Andes as ‘my place of thinking, being, and becoming, of the ways past and present that Nature, gender, and life are intertwined’; she looks at ‘the ways imperial/modern/colonial matrices of power’ have led to ‘new learnings, prospects, considerations, conversations, and articulations’. She sees women playing a very key role in the ‘otherwise’ realization of ecological, cultural, economic and social arrangements. As we mention earlier, Walsh is simultaneously concerned with the appropriation of buen vivir in Europe and elsewhere and to what end and Knox is concerned about appropriating Ubuntu out of its southern African context. This relates to Rocheleau’s experience of the pushback in response to her telling others’ stories through the publication of the 1996 book. If FPE sees its task as one of encounter (as discussed by

16   |  introduction

Barbosa da Costa, Icaza and Ocampo in Chapter 9 in particular) then the ‘we already know this’ statement in response to ‘telling others’ stories’ is harder to sustain, as many professional women claiming to represent the rural poor in their own countries are very far from the realities of the subsistence field and waterhole. A refusal to articulate these realities and ‘knowns’ discloses the class dynamics between professional women performing their role as developed and modern vis-à-vis the poor in need of improvement. This suggests there is still a space for an ‘outsider’ to relate and play some role as witness and other roles in these encounters, and in writing about them produce a kind of ‘encounter-knowledge’ that can undo/unpack assumptions made by professional elites in-country or out of country. The ethics of peeling back these complexities through such encounters are quite serious, however, and require ongoing reflection and discussion (see Nelson in Chapter 4). Silence about other stories and other worldviews can be necessary. Rocheleau has indicated moments when silence was necessary: ‘Given the explosion of corporate biopiracy at the time …, we did not publish the detailed results on the medicinal plants’ (Rocheleau, Chapter 1). As Knox in Chapter 10 states: ‘we need to be careful about and responsible for what we contribute to/co-create, not simply reverting to procedural or well-established forms of knowing. I think that the act of articulation will always be one of reduction (a violence both in terms of itself and how it plays out in “practice”) but instead of seeing this as something stifling, I see it as empowering – it means, for me, that we need to be critically aware and that we have even more (rather than less!) responsibility to “own up to” what we articulate.’

Naming and claiming FPE  In addition to telling others’ stories, FPE scholars and activists have at times claimed to be ‘inclusive’ of those who do not call their work FPE (see the discussion of this theme in Hawkins and Ojeda 2011). In Chapter 10, Tabassi raises a key question about inclusion: ‘I appreciate Wendy’s call to open up feminism, yet also worry about the language of inclusion. Inclusion assumes an interest on the part of the formerly excluded to join, legitimize or assimilate to a system built upon the fragmentation and segregation of peoples and bodies – feminism being one such structure. How can we, instead, dare to recognize the connections between the multiple

introduction  |   17 bodies under attack by discourse, economic systems or militarism without returning to identities we stand behind for strategic purposes, which simultaneously restrict us?’ Decolonial feminism also questions inclusion narratives (see Walsh) and so do many feminist economic perspectives (Wichterich). As the whole volume demonstrates, and as Rocheleau encourages readers to see, FPE is a ‘work in process (not progress) and hopefully on a path, however circuitous, to decolonization’. The tensions and ‘troubles’ within FPE refuse a simplistic framing of FPE as a  set of theories that merely reinforce older ideas or that insist on a singular imagining of only one particular desired state or future world of environmental and social being. Rather, the troubles highlight tensions and sites of generating or creating multiple imaginings and world-making. Trouble 4: Naturecultures, response-able encounters and making coalitions

Damages and achievements One strategy involves building new co­ alitions through responsible encounters. Di Chiro in Chapter 7 argues that it is important for FPE to stray from business as usual ‘and experiment with lively critical analyses, action-based research collaboratives, and hands-on community development projects that can offer productive and life-enhancing possibilities’ as ‘engaged scholars that “trouble” conventional theories and practices’. Staying with the troubles enables more in-depth engagement with the problematic division of nature and culture. The book takes up Haraway’s concept of naturecultures where she proposes that nature is not other to culture but rather the two inform and co-create each other. The book offers reflections on the challenge entailed in practising this natureculture concept in diverse contexts. Di Chiro in Chapter 7 describes how she has worked as researcher and teacher with the resources, motivation and space on different US university campuses in a way that starts from naturecultures rather than an assumed separation of nature and cultures. Her community action work with students and communities in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and in North Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, demonstrates the ‘damages and the achievements’ (following Haraway 2013) involved in staying with the troubles and building coalitions between different positionalities and experiences. The work of listening and worrying and questioning

18   |  introduction

between community residents and university students allows for different naturecultures to be seen, experienced and shared. Naturecultures demand diverse handfuls of dirt brought together through difficult labours of love, struggle and cultural survival, not with a simple ‘hero’ student or other activist motivated with narrow but good intentions (see also Nelson’s chapter). Nightingale in Chapter 6 contrasts policy approaches with the complex relations of community to the environment and naturecultures that are rooted in place but not equivalent to place. She looks at the different people moving in and out of the environs, as the scale of community ‘at times stretches to people who have long since moved away, and at other times is contained to those who live on tenant farms inherited from their grandparents’ grandparents’. Nightingale is deeply concerned about the promotion of social capital and community-based networks as the solutions to local development. She seeks ‘to show how people’s sense of themselves and their place is often in friction with how resilience planners imagine they might foster social capital and harness networks into their disaster risk management schemes’.

Asking too much  Loss and inheriting damages and risks of engagement/working with are issues that we think are among the most compelling features of staying with the troubles. Knox argues in the Chapter 10 conversation: ‘I feel that there is something incredibly important, again, about the act/s of courage required to open ourselves up to the fear, anxiety, uncertainty and vulnerability that arise from the creation of new forms which could trump (rather than reinforce) the systems we are trying to work against. The ability to imagine – and therefore create – alternative assemblages, alternative material embodiments – more equitable forms – is, for me, the value of queer ecologies.’ And Tabassi captures her response to Knox in Figure 10.4. But there also comes a point where such anxieties, fears and sadness become too intense; quieting them becomes a preoccupation for maintaining one’s ability to continue. Engaging anxiety is courageous, yes, but it could be deadly. This is not just referring to despair (e.g. feeling that there are no options or ways forward), but the noise of anxiety/fear being so much in one’s mind that making everything stop is preferable to continuing in such a state of mind. While we seek comfort/curiosity and are challenged by the possibility of the

introduction  |   19 assemblage and staying with the troubles, there is a certain level of anxiety and other dangers that we cannot ask one another to risk because of the repercussions. Asking oneself and others to stay with the trouble in this sense is a big ask … no matter how courageous an act it might seem. This relates to the privilege of notions of reflexivity and being humble. On another note, we all have significant energies invested in our political, professional and other identities, and everyone has worked very hard to craft and achieve those identities. Asking for humility and questioning those identities is a big ask for women, who feel they have broken through gender, racial and other multiple discriminations, and who continue to fight against and survive and thrive in a racist academy and multiple others who are making their presence known and asserting their right to occupy previously and continually ‘off-limits’ spaces of authority and knowledge-making. This tension was very present in our colloquium in the ISS when there were unspoken and spoken concerns raised about generational, racial, professional and geographical differences among the women who attended. While there is appreciation for Northern-based white feminists unpacking and questioning their white privilege and adopting a more humble/situated approach, there is also a sense that women speaking from ‘otherwise’ positions do not need to be humble in their scholarship and knowledge production because of the ongoing discrimination in the academy and beyond. Thus, there is still clearly an identity politics of FPE as process. These are deep and dividing troubles indeed. If they show us anything it is that we cannot fully hide from, and that we do actively cover up, our own practices of contradiction. Conclusion Having introduced some of the ‘troubles’ that run throughout the book, in conclusion we first set out how we have organized the book, before coming back to our opening question.

Organization of the book  The authors contributing to this book and to FPE praxis share specific overlapping interests and concerns. At the same time, there are significant disagreements and provocations in the text that we feel are useful for shaping future FPE work and reflection. A book full of contributions in complete agreement

20   |  introduction

would be boring. A book with chapters that completely lack connection would be confusing. We hope that while readers will not find a consistent method or logic among the chapters, the different voices and experiences within will resonate with readers’ own experiences and engagements with various forms of FPE. Given the different approaches, the chapters are necessarily written in different styles. Some are narratives that follow the lives and contributions of the authors to FPE. Others are based on academic studies in different locations from which the authors illustrate some of the latest thinking on FPE. Others are based on three-way conversations among the authors, raising questions about how they do FPE in and out of academe. The chapters illustrate how FPE builds on the stories and analysis from the many places – rooted, networked and connected – of feminist politics. For ease of reading and organization, we divided the book into three sections, even though there are many overlapping themes among the chapters.

Section One: Positioning feminist political ecology  The first three chapters introduce three major pillars of debate and thinking in practising FPE today. The first is the reworking of feminist political ecology as an action- and research-based ‘discipline’. The second looks at feminist ecology and economy analysis situated within historical and current contexts. The third explores decolonial feminism rooted in social movements and intellectual theory from Europe and the Americas. These opening chapters speak to the need to remake continually our foundational thinking and strategies for practising FPE as a multi-sited process. Rocheleau sets out how FPE was established by feminist scholars and activists within academe and social movements. She introduces her own pathway of learning, different moments of contention and troubles when doing research in Africa and Latin America, her engagement in the US academy moving towards a decolonial turn in FPE praxis, and her interest in Chiapas. Rocheleau demonstrates that the tensions and ‘troubles’ within FPE refuse a simplistic framing of FPE as a single set of theories or a single project. Wichterich looks at the ‘persistent paradoxes and ambivalences’ of ‘mechanisms of inclusion of marginalized and poor groups like women in transnational value chains and new market-based instruments’ and ‘the speedy process of economization of nature and financialization of

introduction  |   21 environmental policies’. Wichterich discusses how FPE can go beyond the green economy by documenting debates between feminist political economy and ecology through her own thinking on care, commons and degrowth, building on the work of feminist economists, critiques of the green economy and engagements of ecofeminists. Walsh outlines the decolonial project from the Andes from an academic engagement as an insider-outsider – and someone who has followed and engaged in Ecuadorean politics. She offers ways to understand life, nature and gender ‘otherwise’ and explains the ‘decolonial’ turn that many of the chapters are interested in taking up and pursuing in future FPE processes.

Section Two: Rethinking feminist political ecology  Section Two takes up key areas in discussion in the ‘new’ FPE represented by a younger generation of FPE now working in academe. Nelson focuses on risky yet hopeful spaces – including key sites of identify performance and emotion – for transforming environmental practices and politics in Mozambique. She examines what making and ‘celebrating as hero’ does vis-à-vis the contradictory practices of a range of ordinary and not-so-ordinary actors in the woodlands of central Mozambique. Through a series of contradictory and awkward encounters, she explores how logging bosses, log haulers, local l­eaders, environmentalists and others become and make heroes amid an intensifying illegal logging trade linking Mozambique and China. Harris considers the potential of an FPE approach that considers the everyday, embodied and emotional relations to resources and ‘natures’. In her discussion of water from an FPE perspective, she examines key questions related to uneven access to water in green economy debates as green technologies play out unevenly in gendered and racialized terms (drawing on her work in south-eastern Turkey and recent projects within and connecting through her academic institution in Canada). Looking at how these shifts (dis)connect populations and places and hide key relationships and interconnections, she shows how feminist and post-colonial theory are helpful in rethinking natures and feminist political ecologies otherwise. Nightingale examines questions of resilience as they connect to livelihoods and rural economies in the face of climate change based on her research on the west coast of Scotland and in the hills of Nepal. She probes how the framing of resilience within mainstream debates

22   |  introduction

is at odds with the kinds of relationships, practices and aspirations of local people. Her chapter interrogates how scale is enrolled as both a limitation and an emancipatory factor when people assert new socio-environmental notions of ‘the local’ and ‘connection’ in a world where time-space compression seems to be ubiquitous.

Section Three: Living feminist political ecology Section Three turns to everyday living of FPE from different generations of feminists reflecting on their years of activism and academic work in candid explorations of their own lives as they have engaged in the theory and practice of FPE. Di Chiro speaks to naturecultures and the discomforts and achievements of building coalitions by ‘staying with the troubles’ in her teaching and scholarship with communities and students in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and North Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the United States. She illustrates her ‘bridge crossing’ with students, communities and her outsider/insider role. She gives examples of her activist and teaching practices in the communities where she has lived, exploring the naturecultures of violated landscapes and lives and engaging and making worlds without losing hope, but taking on and accepting various kinds of uncomfortable loss(es) as part of response-able engagement, including the loss of assumed authority. Harcourt describes three particular moments which shaped her embodied experience of living FPE to illustrate what she calls placebased globalism where global realities are played out in place and where actors bring the concerns and experience of place to events/ places that claim global importance such as the UN, and in so doing transforming and shaping globalization processes. She looks at how change happens via networks that build solidarity, support and creativity, and her own experiences as a student, advocate and activist as part of interacting global networks that have created an alternative, complex and performative sense of social inquiry that makes up FPE.

Trialogues  The last two chapters are ‘trialogues’. The first conversation among three activist researchers questions their worldviews in their intellectual and personal travels through academic research. Their trialogue reflects what they have learnt and what they found inspiring in thinking about lives, nature and genders in their work

introduction  |   23 in different places in Latin America. They look at the role of the academe when thinking about alternatives to ecological violence and in questioning their social locations and their research practices, perspectives and tools. The final trialogue is a textual and pictorial conversation around queer ecology, different ideas about queer theory and experiences from different locations – Europe, the USA and South Africa – ­issues about what it is to be human, post-human and to be uncertain about the future. With reference to a host of literatures and personal stories about embodiment, art and planting, the conversation opens up questions about how the authors face the difficulties, fears and hopes of living in ‘these end times’.

Back to the opening question and what we mean by asking it  This book has evolved over different historical and political economic ­moments linked to neoliberalization and the ‘greening’ of the economy with accompanied assumptions about naturecultures. The book aims to set out how FPE re-engages and rethinks neoliberal extractivism and violence through our analysis of our experience of diverse naturecultures as part of a collective and ongoing process of de­colonizing development practices, political ecology and feminism. There is no standard by which we wish to measure ourselves as ‘green’ or ‘ecological’ or ‘feminist’ or ‘political’ enough. We want to learn how to cope with the complexities and difficult times we are living in via a candid examination of our own positions, practices and questions that trouble and engage us. It is a deliberate countering of the arrogant assumption that we ‘politicians’, ‘experts’, ‘activists’ know how to solve the ongoing violences of neoliberal arts of governing and logics, including the move towards green economic development and marketization of nature to deal with economic and ecological ‘crises’. As the authors show, such countering is built on creative engagements as we stay with the troubles we experience in different places, without attempting to build a normative blueprint or one single vision of where we are heading. We see FPE as networked and expanded feminist endeavours that deal with the social relations of power and justice connected to cultures, ecologies and economies. The book is, then, one of several ongoing, and we hope expanding, academic, practical and rooted feminist endeavours that are in ‘constant circulation of theory, practice, policies and politics, and

24   |  introduction

the mixing of various combinations of gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, ontologies and ecologies, with critique of colonial legacies and neoliberal designs’ (Rocheleau, Chapter 1). Our collective commitment is to move beyond the damaging rhetoric of ‘the green economy’ as we join others ‘to construct new economic imaginaries capable of supporting concrete struggles against neoliberalism and designs for alternative economies’ (Escobar 2010, quoted in ­Harris,  Chapter 5). We see FPE as rising to the challenge of enga­ ging in decolonial thinking and politics, in the politics of becoming otherwise. Notes 1  From 1988 Wendy Harcourt worked in advocacy and research as a feminist researcher and editor in Italy at the ­Society for International Development. She joined ISS in November 2011. She met Ingrid Nelson at ISS in 2012 when Nelson, a feminist and environmental activist and researcher working in ­Mozambique, came for a year of postdoctoral research at the ISS before moving to the University of Vermont. 2  For more details on the colloqui­ um, including who attended, please see the report on the ISS website: www.iss. nl/research/conferences_and_seminars/ previous_iss_conferences_and_seminars/­ environmental_studies_colloquium_ series_critical_engagements_with_the green_economy/environmental_­studies_ colloquium_series_critical_engage­ ments_ with_the_green_economy/ (accessed 9 August 2014). 3  Some key references for feminist theory in development studies are: ­Kabeer (1994); Rai (2008); Visvanathan et al. (2011); feminist geographies: Nelson and Seager (2004); transnational feminist movements: Baksh and Har­ court (2015); post-colonial theory: Loom­ ba (1998); feminist environ­mentalism or ecofeminism: Paulson and Gezon (2005); Scott Cato (2013); critical perspectives in development: Sachs (1992); Escobar

(1994); Rahnema and Bawtree (1997); Cornwall and Eade (2010). 4  Many movements draw from restrictive identity claims – such as ‘women’s movements’, ‘indigenous movements’, ‘peasant movements’, etc. We start by looking at how to blur these categories in order not to exclude and restrict while recognizing the frictions.

References Baksh, R. and W. Harcourt (eds) (2015) OUP Handbook on Transnational Feminist Movements, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Cornwall, A. and D. Eade (2010) Decon­ structing Development Discourse: Buzzwords and Fuzzwords, Oxford: Practical Action Publishing and Oxfam. Desai, M. (forthcoming) ‘Transnational feminist con­tributions to theory and praxis’, in R. Baksh and W. Harcourt (eds), OUP Handbook on Trans­ national Feminist Movements, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Di Chiro, G. (2003) ‘Beyond ecoliberal “common futures”: toxic touring, environmental justice, and a transcommunal politics of place’, in D. Moore, J. Kosek and A. Pandian (eds), Race, Nature, and the Politics

introduction  |   25 of Difference, Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press. — (2010) ‘Polluted politics? Confront­ ing toxic discourse, sex panic, and eco-normativity’, in C. MortimerSandilands and B. Erickson (eds), Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, Bloomington: Indiana Univer­ sity Press. Escobar, A. (1994) Encountering Develop­ ment: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ferguson, J. (2009) ‘The uses of neo­ liberalism’, Antipode, 41(S1): 166–84. Foucault, M. (2008) The Birth of Bio­ politics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, trans. G. Burchell, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gibson-Graham, J. K. (1996) The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, Cam­ bridge, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell. — (2006) A Postcapitalist Politics, Min­ neapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J. K., J. Cameron and S. Healy (2013) Take Back the Eco­ nomy: An Ethical Guide for Transform­ ing Our Communities, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, D. (1989) Primate Visions: Gen­ der, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, London: Routledge. — (2007) When Species Meet, Minnea­ polis: University of Minnesota Press. — (2013) ‘Multispecies cosmopolitics: staying with the trouble’, Institute for Humanities Research Distinguished Lecture, Institute for Humanities Research, Arizona State University, 22 March. Harcourt, W. (2009) ‘Global women’s rights movements: feminists in trans­ formation’, in What Next Volume: The Case for Pluralism, Uppsala: Dag Ham­ marskjöld Foundation, pp. 163–99. — (2012) ‘Epilogue’, in W. Harcourt

(ed.), Women Reclaiming Sustain­ able Livelihoods: Spaces Lost, Spaces Gained, London: Palgrave, pp. 266–8. Hawkins, R. and D. Ojeda (2011) ‘Gender and environment: critical tradition and new challenges’, Environment and Planning D: Society & Space, 29(2). Kabeer, N. (1994) Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought, London: Verso. Loomba, A. (1998) Colonialism-Post­ colonialism, London and New York: Routledge. Lugones, M. (2008) ‘The coloniality of gender’, in The Worlds and Know­ ledges Otherwise, vol. 2, dossier 2: On the Decolonial II: Gender and De­ coloniality, Centre for Global Studies and the Humanities, Duke University, globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/wkov2d2, accessed 7 August 2014. Mohanty, C. T. (2003) Feminism without Borders. Decolonizing Theory, Prac­­ ticing Solidarity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mortimer-Sandilands, C. and B. Erickson (eds) (2010) Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nelson, L. and J. Seager (2004) A Companion to Feminist Geography, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Paulson, S. and L. L. Gezon (2005) Politi­ cal Ecology across Spaces, Scales, and Social Groups, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Rahnema M. and V. Bawtree (eds) (1997) The Post-Development Reader, London: Zed Books. Rai, S. (2008) The Gender Politics of Development, London: Zed Books. Rocheleau, D. and P. Nirmal (2015) ‘Femi­ nist political ecologies: grounded, networked and rooted on earth’, in R. Baksh and W. Harcourt (eds), OUP Handbook on Transnational Feminist Movements, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 793–814

26   |  introduction Rocheleau, D., B. Thomas-Slayter and E. Wangari (1996) Feminist Political Ecology, London: Routledge. Sachs, W. (1992) The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, London and Atlantic High­ lands, NJ: Zed Books. Scott Cato, M. (2013) The Bioregional Economy. Land, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, London: Routledge/ Earthscan.

Shiva, V. (1997) Staying Alive, London: Zed Books. Vargas, V. (2005) ‘Feminisms and the World Social Forum: space for dialogue and confrontation’, Develop­ ment, ‘Movement of Movements’, 48(2): 107–10. Visvanathan, N., L. Duggen, N. Wieg­ ersma and L. Nisonoff (eds) (2011) The Women, Gender and Development Reader, 2nd edn, London: Zed Books.

1 | A SITUATED VIEW OF FEMINIST POLITICAL ECOLOGY FROM MY NET WORKS, ROOTS AND TERRITORIES

Dianne Rocheleau

Introduction To provide a self-reflective grounded sense of why and how and where feminist political ecology (FPE) emerged, my chapter reflects on my experiences, in place and in person, as well as in my writing and engagement with the stories of others. In this way I can convey my own situated and partial knowledge as part of a larger movement and a journey, a coalition and a coalescence of people seeking to decolonize themselves, their professions, social and environmental movements and the terms of encounters across distinct cultures, histories and geographies. I write as someone who has roots in an imperial state and dominant culture (the USA) and who is defined by various other identities (subjugated and dominant), based on gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality and race, expressed in cultures, economies and ecologies. I write as a thinker, and also as a listener – that is, as the Zapatistas have it, as an honest, engaged and situated reporter and witness. I have been at various times and places an observer, advocate, scribe, investigator, participant and analyst, with affiliations ranging from universities and philanthropic foundations to international agriculture and forestry research centres, national and international NGOs, local and larger social movements, and various solidarity networks. In the chapter I situate myself in each instance as I report particular examples of FPE, in relation to intersections and encounters with dominant or different and alternative practices, policies and ways of being. Early seeds of FPE In 1979, as a PhD student, I went to the Cordillera Central (Central Mountains) of the Dominican Republic to investigate the relationship of upland land-use practices to river systems and their downstream

30   |  one

uses, including hydroelectric energy, urban water supplies, irrigation of commercial rice fields and sedimentation of coastal zones. I was focused on physical processes in watersheds, their relation to urban/ rural inequalities and class, and the possible reconciliation of upland and lowland priorities and practices in the Sierra region and the Yaque river basin. Gender was not on my agenda except as a kind of cultural minefield, as I negotiated my own personal and professional position in a sea of male foresters, soil conservation and water engineers, technicians and rural farmers. This was not new, given my field experience as an environmental specialist in Tampa, Florida, and as a graduate student in two less-than-woman-friendly departments. I was a feminist, but in my professional life I had not gone beyond the question of personal and professional equity for myself and other women, in relation to my prior environmental fieldwork in the USA and my planned work in environment and development in the Sierra. I was working directly with Plan Sierra, an integrated rural conservation and development project, funded, designed and staffed by Dominicans, as a joint venture between private capital and national government. It was one of the first conservation and development projects of its kind, prior to the appearance of ‘sustainable development’. I, unknowingly, had been seduced by imperial privilege. I had been given the impression at the university that it was easier to ‘get things done’ and ‘make an impact’ in both environment and economic development in developing countries than at home in the USA. The prevailing private property framework and weak environmental laws in the USA left little room to regulate land-use patterns and practices in the public interest, and to protect ecosystems from destruction, degradation and contamination. In addition, the developing country context in which some of my professors worked was more like my own extended family home places (Quebec/Vermont borderlands and Appalachia) than the professional workplaces and field sites of my professors working in the USA. So I changed advisers and fields and became an apprentice in the nascent field of environment and development, with all the privileges and problems that implies. It would take years of another alternative and simultaneous apprenticeship with people in local and larger landscapes across several countries, and decades of work (ongoing), to surmount those problems and fully confront issues of privilege mixed with elements of subjugated

rocheleau  |   31 identities (gender, class and ethnicity). And of course I was not alone. If it takes a village to raise a child, perhaps it takes 1,000 villages and their uninvited apprentices to inform, motivate and guide a paradigm shift, and eventually a political reversal, among academics, professionals and activists involved in environment, development and social justice (Rocheleau 2005). Two expressions of gendered realities in this context put gender front and centre in my thinking about environment and development, even though it would not fit within the covers and the conceptual confines of my very technical dissertation on soil and water conservation (Rocheleau and Hoek 1984). First, the landscape was replete with women-headed or womenmanaged households, since a large proportion of men between the ages of twenty and fifty had emigrated from the Sierra region to the USA, mostly to New York City. Yet the women who stayed behind were not allowed to farm the land alone, without an adult male family member. I had asked to meet some women farmers to include them in my preliminary study to design a soil and water sampling network on farmers’ fields, forests and pastures and in the streams and rivers that drained the watersheds of three different communities. I was told that there were almost no women farmers, yet I saw them everywhere carrying machetes, cutting firewood and working in the fields. I was told they were ‘helping’ but not really ‘farming’, that they could not open up a field with a plough and plant it on their own without seriously damaging their status in their families and communities. Of course that resonated with my own experience at home. My mother was said to be ‘helping out’ (not co-supporting us) when she held an office job and still did all the housework in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, while my father was seen as the ‘breadwinner’. In reality they both worked very hard to make a working-class life for us. So I asked my engineering and technical colleagues to connect me to the only two ‘women farmers’ that they knew through their soil conservation and forestry extension work. Sara Sanchez’s husband had left years ago and had sent money regularly, then less and intermittently, and finally it stopped. There was no telling whether he was remarried or unemployed or not well, since many men found themselves stranded and unable to travel readily between the two countries owing to increased immigration law enforcement. Sara was the effective head of household with several children (none of them

32   |  one

adult sons), and her disabled elder father-in-law who could no longer do manual farm labour. The entire family worked at home weaving palm fibre containers (esterra) for tobacco producers, but the prices were too low to make ends meet. The reality was that they needed to farm to eat. Sara waited to do it at night. She gathered the children and explained what they would do and why. She rented a team of oxen from a neighbour and on a moonlit night, under partial cover of darkness, they opened up the plot, ploughed it and sowed it before daylight. She would not be able to bear the taunts and scrutiny of her neighbours if they saw her opening up a plot and daring to act as ‘the farmer’. She did have to face them later but it was easier. She felt judged and shunned, yet proud of her plot of mixed field crops and the harvest it would yield. Berta Frias was a single woman who dressed in men’s trousers and high rubber boots and a man’s cotton jacket. She had abandoned the typical female dress of women in the area and was openly farming on her own. She was respected by my colleagues as a good farmer and a hard worker but was not treated as a respected woman by the community. She was on her own. She spoke of the need to farm and talked proudly of how she liked the work and did it well. Carmen Ramirez was my neighbour in the countryside. She too was a married woman whose husband had long since left. She worked in a little country bar down the road and was involved with a man who was married and perhaps visited and financially supported other women, in addition to Carmen. The community gossiped a bit about Carmen but did not exclude or shun her. I asked my friends about the paradox of the degree of acceptance of Carmen’s situation versus the judgement and censure that Berta and Sara endured. My understanding of their reply, in my own words, was that it was better to transgress as a woman, than to be unwomanly. This was clearly about more than being male or female and having land or not. It was about gendered divisions of labour, rights to land, norms of behaviour, and complex identities. An abandoned woman being supported by a married man did not challenge male privilege and authority in the same way as being ‘the farmer’ and opening the land. If Sara and Berta had been wealthy enough to hire men to open the land and ‘farm’ it, that would also have been acceptable. Deeply ingrained concepts of gender, class and lineage entwined with and

rocheleau  |   33 permeated relationships to the living world, landscapes and sustenance. This was not a ‘discovery’. It was a lesson delivered by the women themselves and my colleagues. Suddenly the land lit up with gendered landscapes and land-use patterns and the material implications for water and resource management and food production. The second revelation in this gendered landscape came courtesy of a woman who lived on one of the farms where I was monitoring erosion, and an anthropologist colleague who had lived in the same community for over a year. I had been visiting Jose and Maria Vasquez’s farm for three or four months, planning, surveying and constructing the erosion and runoff monitoring equipment on their sloping field of cassava, then periodically returning after each rainfall to measure the amount of water and soil in the collection tanks and to collect samples of the soil eroded from the plots. Each time I ­arrived Maria very cordially invited me to have a cup of coffee in her kitchen, which I always refused, equally cordially, being too ‘busy’ with ‘real’ work to spend time with her. One day I arrived to find the entire slope had slumped and taken with it the block construction of the experimental plot and all the equipment as well. I was devastated. My research was in jeopardy. While I took pictures and measurements in order to estimate the amount of soil lost in that storm and landslip, Maria came out once again. I accepted the coffee and the chance to leave the field behind and enjoy the shade and hospitality of her open-air kitchen. Over the next hour she related to me the cropping and land-use history of her own plot and the entire small watershed in which the community was nestled. The plot had been cropped originally in rotation, to produce mixed food crops, then later continuously in peanuts, and tobacco. Finally, after thirty years, Jose planted cassava as a single crop, when nothing else would grow. Maria had asked him to give the land a rest but he said they had no alternative. She concluded that this landslip (small landslide) on their plot was surely the result of that history. She noted that most farms in the valley had a similar tale to tell. Maria also recounted the parallel history of her once flourishing small business as a producer of casabe, a flatbread made from fermented cassava (yuca) tubers. The traditional long-lasting crisp flatbread can be rebaked on the stove top and served crisp, after weeks of storage, an important advantage in remote montane regions. The processing of the tubers (fermentation, drying, mixing, cooking and

34   |  one

baking) required knowledge, skill, plenty of cassava roots and a regular supply of high-quality firewood to fuel the large clay oven outside her home. Maria reported that she had to close down her business owing to the scarcity and resulting high price of local firewood. She described the rapidly rising price of firewood and the slower rise and eventual ceiling of casabe prices, and her decision to quit producing at the point of what economists would call ‘diminishing returns’. She noted that the men in the community had deforested the hills that ringed their bowl-shaped watershed, for quick economic gain. She stated that she and the other women had no voice in that decision. Maria was not a ‘farmer’ but a ‘farm wife’ and an artisan/business owner, with a very distinct perspective and different types of knowledge about the watershed and land use, as well as the household economy and the gender relations inherent in each. So I learned from her about the facts of the community and watershed history, as well as the distinct logics, knowledges and necessities of men and women and of people involved in crop and timber production versus food processing. All of their livelihoods were embedded in ecologies, economies and landscapes not always of their own making. The men’s options were constrained by national and international labour and commodity markets and the women were unable to make their case for forest conservation and management or soil conservation and diverse food crops, against the backdrop of unequal land distribution and unfavourable market conditions. Three years later, after writing my PhD thesis, I spoke with E ­ ugenia (Nia) Georges (1990, 1992), who had lived in the same area doing an ethnographic study of resources, land use, land tenure and migra­ tion. She added to Maria’s story an account of the mysteriously sleepy young men in the neighbouring town, who were cutting the forest and loading logs on trucks by night, then sleeping in the park and outside their homes during the day. The entire enterprise was orchestrated by a well-to-do and politically connected person from outside the community.1 She also told me the gendered story about the entwined fate of the hogs, the people who raised them, the palm trees in the pastures, and the palm fibre weavers. Prior to the swine flu epidemic both women and men had raised and sold hogs, with palm fruit as a major source of feed. Male owners of property with palm trees also sometimes cut them for timber, a prized building material for local

rocheleau  |   35 houses. While the male head of household owned the land and the trees, both women and men each fed their own hogs the fruit, and the women of the house could harvest, or allow other women (family, friends, neighbours) to harvest, some of the palm fronds for fibre. They wove this into containers used to transport tobacco leaves and sold the containers to middlemen. When the swine flu epidemic swept through the area, the USDA advisers mandated destruction of all the pigs in the country. So many men and women lost an important source of cash, which was the major or only income source for many women. The fact that the palm fruit was no longer needed increasingly led male property owners to cut the trees for timber, leaving the women of their own households and the larger community without the fibre to weave the tobacco containers. While the containers required long hours of labour and sold at a low price, this was the only direct and independent source of cash for some women, especially those in the poorest households, as I had learned earlier from Sara (see above). So there were gender divisions of labour, land use and tenure that led to gendered economic consequences of the swine flu epidemic, and subsequently produced specific landscapes and ecologies. At the same time Carmen Diana Deere and Magdalena Leon de Leal published their groundbreaking book on sexual division of labour in Andean peasant production systems, which I would encounter a few years later. After some time in the more explicitly gendered landscapes of Kenya, I distilled the lessons from Maria and Nia in a diagram (see Figure 1.1, page 36) that informed foresters, farming systems researchers and practitioners, gender-focused researchers and development specialists and eventually feminist political ecologists (Rocheleau 1987). This encounter with gendered and intersectional identities embedded in landscapes and livelihoods was for me the first seed of FPE which bloomed later in another phase of my research in a very different place. I suspect that I was not alone in this and that many of my colleagues have had similar experiences. We went into ‘the field’ (someone else’s home, habitat, workplace, world) to look at differences in class and in rural versus urban interests, and differences in environment and development priorities. We were surprised and suddenly immersed in previously (to us) illegible gendered livelihoods and landscapes shaped by gendered power relations, across rural and urban spaces and North/South lines. It took many of us academics

Fibre O +

Fruit for animal fodder

Wood O

O O +

Whole tree O crl O + rl

pasture O crl

food and fibre processing O + crl

cropland

O O +

crl l

patio compound O + crl

forest remnants O crl O + rl

r = responsibility to provide a product thereof or a service function to the household or the community

l = labour input for establishment, maintenance or harvest of crops, trees and infrastructure

c = control of resource, process and/or products 1.1  Gendered household and community resources in Pananao, Dominican Republic (source: Rocheleau 1987)

rocheleau  |   37 and development specialists a bit longer to situate ourselves within the larger systems that we all inhabited. Another slice of space and time: Kenya 1983–93 In the semi-arid savannas and farm-forest patchwork landscapes of Kenya a flood of new insights about gendered landscapes and livelihoods emerged in the 1980s, for many researchers, practitioners and advocates, myself included. These derived from encounters with individuals, households and entire communities across more than forty language groups, living in ecosystems from coastal rainforests to arid deserts, humid montane ecosystems above 2,000 metres, and semi-arid savannas with a mosaic of farms, grasslands and dry forest. At this time I was working for ICRAF (International Center for Research in Agroforestry, now World Agroforestry Center) with a mandate to develop and test participatory research methods with farmers, while working with them on their own priorities to better integrate trees, crops and livestock on their farms. The idea was to produce food, firewood, construction and craft material, for local use and commercial sale, as well as conserving or restoring soil, water and forest resources. Here too the contradictions of institutional policy and practice and the gendered realities of everyday life were quite stark, in both national and international institutions. While women in sub-Saharan Africa as a whole contributed 80 per cent of the labour for food production, in Machakos District, where we worked, the rate was even higher, based on a long history of men migrating to work in the military (from 1914 to 1985) or on plantations (1920s to the present). Yet our small pilot project was working almost exclusively with men farmers (nine men and one couple on ten farms). A second contradiction had to do with scale, landscape logics and gender. Machakos District was renowned for its self-help groups, primarily women, who produced baskets and rope, rotated group work to build terraces and weed each other’s croplands, as well as conducting soil conservation, pasture restoration and gully repair in stream courses. Yet we were collaborating on ten individual farms, mostly at the plot scale, reflecting the prevailing agronomic and technology-driven approach to farming systems and even agroforestry at the time. Since I had come to this position with a proposal to work on both

38   |  one

gender and ecology in agroforestry systems, it was easy to move up to watershed and landscape scale and to seek the collaboration of the women’s self-help groups, a student intern at ICRAF (Annette van Hoek) and her academic adviser (Duchhart et al. 1988; Rocheleau and Hoek 1984).2 Women in several groups were keen to work with us since students and researchers in prior projects had been good neighbours and had brought resources, some interesting seeds for crops or fruit tree seedlings, and occasional help with transportation, medicine and useful connections to government agencies and NGOs. While we naively sought to ‘help’ them with trees at their group sites for soil conservation, gully repair and pasture restoration, the women eventually taught us that the group sites were chosen by extension officers by order of the government-appointed chief. He chose the type of work and the sites for visibility from the highway, to showcase local participation in national soil conservation priorities. They did not want trees for these sites but for their own farms, and soon proposed that we collaborate to build small group nurseries at the homes of group leaders or prominent active members with adequate water sources and space. They explained that the groups were real but that their priority was for shared work on each other’s individual farms and some key sites to repair gullies, paths and roads. They worked on the chief’s conservation sites in order to stay in his good graces, high on the list to receive relief food in times of drought. So our focus on women’s community labour sites was not, in itself, the key to serving them and their priorities. However, a full season of working together at those sites created mutual trust and understanding and a context for conversation, rather than ‘interviews’. The more we worked together and talked, the more our understanding grew to encompass complicated histories and geographies marked by gender, class, race and ethnicity, as well as positionality in the colonial system. Though we worked with women’s groups, some of the best insights were conveyed by ICRAF soil conservation associate Richard Mwendandu, an Akamba man who spoke Kikamba, Kiswahili and English and shared our combined social and environmental curiosity and concerns. Eventually we learned that we had also misread the broader historical and institutional context of the celebrated Akamba communal work institution called mwethya. The communal work parties were a traditional institution, and had been assimilated and reactivated by the

rocheleau  |   39 colonial authorities during the Second World War to organize women’s forced labour on cropland terraces, pasture restoration and gully repair. Most of the men were away in the army, chasing Rommel across the desert with the British general Montgomery, fighting the Italians in Somalia or travelling to Palestine and then almost to Pakistan, by land, by sea and then by land again, or, eventually, liberating Paris. The tradition of communal home building, land clearing and other tasks, performed by groups of men and women with complem­ entary gendered duties and skills, was assimilated and turned into a colonial institution to extract women’s labour under the control of colonial  agricultural officers. After independence this waned, while informal groups continued to rotate cropland and building tasks on each other’s farms, as people were forced to identify permanent private household plots for eventual survey and titling by colonial officers, or later by the new independent state. In the 1980s the national state reinstituted official self-help mwethya groups as women’s groups, responsible for everything from soil conservation to construction of roads, dams and schools. Yet the women had counter-assimilated this new version of mwethya. Through the group structures they gained a degree of political voice and influence at village, location and district level, and access to material benefits, including relief food in times of drought, development projects with services such as mother and child clinics, small water distribution projects and access to markets for their Akamba baskets through international women’s NGOs. They also continued to work on each other’s farms under the new formal groups (Rocheleau 1991). The drought and famine in 1984/85 brought a new sense of urgency, and then full-blown emergency, into an already difficult situation in the semi-arid farming villages of Machakos. The feminization of farming gave way to the feminization of drought response and famine. Perhaps the strongest impetus for my own sense of FPE derived from working with, observing and documenting the challenges and the responses of women in Kathama as they rose to meet the challenge of a ‘hundred-year drought’. As the drought set in and shortages of food, water and fodder began to emerge, the women explained to me about the patronage system used by chiefs to distribute relief food from national, international and NGO agencies. They strategized how to manage their work on the group sites mandated for soil conservation, while

40   |  one

conserving their energy for their own cropping and livestock herding tasks, and protecting the most vulnerable (elder women, young mothers and pregnant women) from over-exertion. Meanwhile, they were busy advocating with chiefs, sub-chiefs and district officials for fair, efficient and transparent distribution of the expected shipments of maize and beans. At this time the importance of gendered indigenous knowledge came into play as a major force in drought and famine response and survival. The kinds of knowledge mobilized and shared among and between men and women, and across generations, ranged from botany, agriculture, human and livestock nutrition, medicinal plants and wild foods to the political economy of soil conservation work, poli­ tical patronage, public opinion and food distribution. Young women began to seek out, on behalf of their groups, elder men who could tell them about what plants might be suitable for emergency famine fodder to get the livestock through the drought and also to identify herbal medicinals for livestock. They consulted elder and specialized women about herbal remedies, nutritional supplements and wild foods, especially for children (Rocheleau et al. 1989; Rocheleau, Benjamin and Diang’a 1995; Rocheleau, Steinberg and Benjamin 1995). The women’s groups were focal points of information exchange and discussion of strategy from household to regional level. The women compiled information (mostly committed to memory) about how to identify the appropriate species, where to find them and how to prepare them. The complementarity of knowledge by gender became clear, as well as the fluidity of gendered labour and responsibilities under changing conditions. The women of the communities organized the rapid exchange and recombination of knowledge across generations and gender lines and began to conduct experiments – for example, on the fodder potential of some trees and shrubs unknown to their elders. Likewise we engaged in various discussions about the possible use of various wild plants and alternative field and tree crops to produce food, fodder, firewood, medicine and cash (and later published summaries of a collaborative ethnobotany study).3 The drought created a crucible where people brought multiple knowledges, and in retrospect I would say multiple worlds, into conversation to generate new gendered knowledge and practices for survival under changing conditions of climate, as well as economy and politics. Also key to the drought and famine response were the

rocheleau  |   41 traditional authorities, operating in parallel with government institutions, in the form of men’s and women’s councils of elders who met, deliberated, made judgements, and advised the communities. They dealt with questions about what level of support (lodging, food, cash) to request of urban relatives during the drought, and what to offer rural relatives from drier, harder-hit areas (food and shelter for people and livestock), and how many people and animals should be allowed per Kathama household (Japheth Kyengo, personal communication, 1985). In later years these same councils would recommend changing the land tenure and inheritance rules, encouraging fathers of unwed daughters with children to allocate land to them. Meanwhile, once the drought was in full swing the famine was named, again through these parallel networks of knowledge and authority. In a meeting with men and women elders, Alice Mwau summarized the elder women’s knowledge of history: ‘we are poor and unschooled, and we don’t know [about] numbered wars. We reckon time in famines, and remember them by name.’ She and her elder colleagues at that same meeting then listed dozens of named events, many of them famines, with the names encapsulating the central surprise and lesson of each, to inform people’s understanding of the past and their actions in the future. The Machakos Akamba name for the drought of 1984/85 was ‘I shall die with the money in my hand’. It captured the irony of having money to buy food but no food for sale. The drought was nationwide and the money of the Machakos labour migrants and day labourers could not buy food from other regions, because they too were affected. And when the relief food came from abroad, Machakos had to compete with urban populations and other agricultural districts with higher political priority. So the name of the famine punctured the bubble; the dream of paid employment as a hedge against hunger was a cruel joke. By planting time the next year, young families who had depended almost exclusively on their cash earnings from nearby plantations to buy food were constructing terraces and planting staple food crops on their small hill-slope plots. They were making sure to have a reserve of cassava and other tubers in the ground, as well as maize and beans. They would not be fully self-provisioning, but they would be prepared for widespread food scarcity with their own stored harvest and a reserve of root crops still underground (Rocheleau, Benjamin and Diang’a 1995). My own participant observation (one to two days a week or every

42   |  one

cropland O cr O + rl

garden O + cl woodlot (lumber) O cl

corral off-farm bushland O rl O + rl

O O +

crl rl grazing land O cr O + rl

r = responsibility to provide a product thereof or a service function to the household or the community

l = labour input for establishment, maintenance or harvest of crops, trees and infrastructure

c = control of resource, process and/or products 1.2  Gender and division of land use units, Kathama-Machakos District, Kenya (source: Rocheleau et al. 1995)

second week over years) and men’s and women’s accounts of these events brought the idea of complementarity front and centre, as well as the dynamic nature of gender division of labour, knowledge and authority. Likewise, the persistence and active participation of the traditional councils demonstrated the continuing significance of traditional (indigenous) institutions in everyday life and at major watershed moments in history requiring judgement and vision. The

rocheleau  |   43 Beehive

O

crl Terminalia brownii

O

crl Deadwood O + crl

Green fodder O c O + (c)rl

Fuelwood

O +

(c)rl O c

Euphorbia litter and compost O + crl Terminalia leaf litter O + crl

Foundation beans O crl

Younger finger Euphorbia fence shrubsize plants

Sisal leaf O + crl Older finger Euphorbia left to grow tall: trunk O crl twig leaf O + crl

whole tree as fencing establishment O crl whole tree as fence maintenance O +

1.3  Gender division of plants and products (source: Rocheleau et al. 1995)

principle of gender complementarity under uneven relations of power and the importance of parallel institutions and domains of knowledge and authority (defined by gender, or by culture) carried forward into my own work ‘in the field’ and later entered into feminist political ecology in the academy (Rocheleau et al. 1996). So by 1986 there was sufficient information and understanding to draw simple pictures of gendered landscapes, livelihoods and multiple and overlapping rights and responsibilities (Figures 1.2, 1.3), which were all connected to militaries, national political economy, international aid and the politics of ‘helping’ in conservation and development. The latter part I did not put in the pictures, except implicitly. They were meant as an antidote to the errors and limitations of science nested in larger patriarchal and neocolonial frameworks. This allowed some people to take in the gender and sometimes

44   |  one

even the class or rural/urban issues, as well as the need to rethink our own assumptions and our positions as researchers seeking to serve the ‘public good’. It made clear there were many publics, and opened the door to defining multiple groups of land users, beyond just ‘farmers’ or ‘households’. The gendered drought response also spurred a shift in research objectives and focus towards applied4 ecology, multiple local knowledges and alternatives to development. With colleagues from the University of Nairobi and Kamoji Wachira, consulting botanist, I conducted a research project on women’s knowledge and use of wild and semidomesticated edible and medicinal plants in gendered landscapes on and beyond farms, in two districts of Kenya (Siaya and Machakos), and gendered knowledge of pest control in Machakos (Rocheleau et al. 1989; Malaret and Ngoru 1989). Given the explosion of corporate biopiracy at the time (Shiva 1997), we did not publish the detailed results on the medicinal plants. Later, while at the Ford Foundation (eastern and southern Africa with HQ in Nairobi), from 1986 to 1989, I continued to visit and to write about Kathama, and Machakos, under the continuing guidance and tutelage of rural women and men. Throughout this period the seeds of FPE were sprouting all around me. Fred Weber, Alison Field-Juma and I wrote some of these elements into the ICRAF book Agroforestry in Dryland Africa (Rocheleau et al. 1988), which was inspired by Marilyn Hoskins (Weber and Hoskins 1983), then Community Forestry Officer at FAO.5 While it did not invoke gender or feminism as major topics it was a stealth infiltration of FPE into agroforestry, before FPE had a name. The gendered landscape and livelihood illustrations and the political cartoons of gendered participatory research by Terry Hirst brought a decidedly decolonial edge to the seemingly innocuous book. Likewise the research methods and processes described in the text raised who and why questions, and sections on multiple land-user groups and local knowledges introduced research and development professionals to the complexities of gendered and classed landscapes and livelihoods as the context for agroforestry research, development and design. FPE emerging in place During this same decade (1979–89) of my own apprenticeship to communities in the Dominican Republic and Kenya, Wangari Maathai

rocheleau  |   45 was building the foundation and launching the ambitious yet grounded agenda of the Women’s Greenbelt Movement. She had already begun a massive reforestation effort with advocacy for women’s rights, agency and access to resources in environmental and political arenas. She founded the Greenbelt Movement (GBM) in 1977 under the auspices of the National Council of Women of Kenya (NCWK). Rural Kenyan women reported streams drying up, insecure food supplies and long treks to procure firewood and fencing. GBM encouraged them to ‘work together to grow seedlings and plant trees to bind the soil, store rainwater, provide food and firewood, and receive a small monetary token for their work’. As the tree planting work proceeded Maathai and others increasingly saw that the everyday economic and environmental hardships of the poor were rooted in disempowerment, disenfranchisement and a loss of traditional cultural values with respect to the living world. They developed Community Empowerment and Education  seminars (CEE), to ‘encourage individuals to examine why they lacked agency to change their political, economic, and environmental circumstances’ and to work for the common good (social, economic and environmental). The GBM created new democratic spaces and campaigns to hold political officials accountable. The group fought against land grabbing and encroachment of commercial agriculture into Kenyan forests (long before the current waves of land grabbing across Africa in 2008/09 set off a global alarm). GBM also contested the construction of a party headquarters tower in Uhuru Park in downtown Nairobi, and joined other groups calling for the release of political prisoners in the 1990s. Like many other women’s, peasant and indigenous groups, GBM began as a local resistance to cultural and ecological damage, with simultaneous development of local alternatives, then projected its voice and influence into, and drew strength from, regional and international networks. The organization has continued after the death of Maathai in 2011, and currently conducts campaigns on climate change, Africa’s rainforests in the Congo, and ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ locally and globally. GBM also collaborates in the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Billion Tree Campaign (see Maathai 2004, 2008; GBM 2014). Maathai personally led non-violent civil disobedience to defend public forests and parks, which eventually expanded to include defence of human rights against the provocation and engineering of ethnic warfare by powerful state actors, including

46   |  one

the office of the president. She would eventually receive a Nobel Peace Prize for her environmental work and broader peacemaking efforts. She was an inspiration and a founder of FPE enacted on the ground, not least because she connected women, environment, development and political power. However, she did not question the logic of capitalist development itself. Across the continent in the Gambia in the mid- to late 1980s Judith Carney did just that, from a combined feminist and Marxist standpoint, connected to land and ecological diversity. She was observing, documenting and analysing the gendered political economy and cultural ecology of a large-scale agricultural development project. In response to criticism of previous projects that transferred all men and women’s lands, private and communal, into the hands of individual men, this major irrigated rice scheme preferentially allocated land titles to women (Carney 1993). Unfortunately, women’s crops and cropland niches were displaced or destroyed in the process. Their titles to land meant little in the face of traditional and modernist national institutions that enacted and approved, respectively, a ‘traditional’ ruling to give male elders communal authority over women’s labour on these newly surveyed and titled ‘private’ plots. Women responded by forming groups and selling gang labour on the large plots of wealthy men, leaving their own household plots short of labour. Domestic violence ensued, conflicts abounded, and the local diet as well as the agricultural ecology suffered owing to loss of specific landscape niches, crop varieties and wild plants with multiple uses and values. So, even when development agencies tried to benefit women, they sometimes caused great harm to women, whole communities and their environments. Carney’s work brought women’s concerns firmly into ‘the agrarian question in Africa’ and the critique of capitalist agricultural development in the region. Shortly thereafter Melissa Leach (1994) published Rainforest Rela­ tions, on gender relations and resources in Sierra Leone, and a few years later Rick Schroeder (1999) used FPE to frame his work on gendered agroforests in the Gambia. Across Africa and south to Madagascar, Lucy Jarosz (1991) similarly brought a feminist and political economy analysis to women in agrarian systems based on sharecropping, with surprising results. Women in some cases were successfully managing the system to their advantage. Across the Indian Ocean and north into the Lower Himalayas, tens

rocheleau  |   47 of thousands of women in the fabled Chipko movement were writing their own FPE script with their feet – that is to say, on the ground, and in the farms and forests, like Wangari Maathai and the women of GBM. Vandana Shiva observed and wrote about the women of the larger peasant movement to protect the forests of Tehri Gharwal and neighbouring districts. Similarly to women in Machakos, the Kenyan Women’s Development organization Maendaleo ya Wanawake, and the Women’s Greenbelt Movement, Chipko emerged as a recognized movement in the late 1970s and was popularized as a women’s and Gandhian movement in Vandana Shiva’s popular book Staying Alive (1988). The movement was split into two wings: the devotional wing led by the charismatic religious leader Sunderlal Bahuguna; and that  led by the Gandhian rural cooperatives leader Chandi Prasad Bhatt (Fortmann and Rocheleau 1984). Some academics have faulted Shiva for presenting the movement as feminist and women-led, and point to the regional, ethnic and peasant focus of the movement to protect resources and ecosystems of tribal peoples from multinationals and state (national) forestry managers who were jointly felling the forests under the timber concession system. Yet thousands of women marched and trekked through the mountains during that period, and others defended the forests in their home communities, facing men with chainsaws, sometimes their own men seeking to establish government development projects, and sometimes local or regional employees of multinational timber companies. Women were also committing suicide by jumping from the heights of nearby slopes into the river valleys below, an expression of hopelessness and exhaustion as they tried in vain to carry out the subsistence work of women in increasingly deforested landscapes. An alternative response was to organize in Gandhian cooperatives, like those founded by Bhatt, to keep the forest in the hands of the people, producing multiple species of timber for local construction and artisanal production and protecting the watersheds and the river valleys below and downstream. Some women left their homes to participate in long pilgrimages with Bahuguna across and up the Himalayan slopes to sacred forest and mountain-top sites, and to gather in camps to listen, sing, learn and commit to the protection of forests, soils and rivers in their home places. So Chipko was, at least in part, fuelled by the energy of women in the Lower Hima­ layas committed to protecting their forests, land and rivers from the

1.4  Gendered m ­ ultiple use of landscape niches and trees in Fakot V ­ illage, Tehri Garhwal District, in the Lower Himalaya (source: Rocheleau 1987)

c = control of resource, process and/or products

harvest of crops, trees and infrastructure

l = labour input for establishment, maintenance or

service function to the household or the community

r = responsibility to provide a product thereof or a

rocheleau  |   49 depredations of state and corporate greed, and even the modernist development dreams of their own men. Yet many still downplayed the role of the movement. Among them, Bina Agarwal (1987, 1992, 2010) focused on the land rights of women and argued for land tenure reform that would allocate legal land titles to women. My own brief research visit to Tehri Gharwal District with ICRAF in 1985 resulted in a gendered landscape and livelihood sketch (Figure 1.4), with a narrative account, from short-term discussions and observations with women and men from Fakot Village, a group of forty-five scientists from the Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR) and four other scientists from ICRAF. I later published it, along with the prior examples from Kenya and the Dominican Republic, which informed subsequent work on analysis, and mapping, of gendered tree and resource tenure (Rocheleau 1987). Meanwhile I continued to visit, support and learn from the experiences and reflections of people in rural communities across three countries (Kenya, Zimbabwe and Tanzania) and to write and present my ‘findings’ – or, as it were, gifts – from encounters with other worlds. I shared observations, ‘discoveries’, analyses and conclusions with professional and academic colleagues in development, and began to look homeward to the USA for an academic position where I might pursue broader questions of power, culture and ecology (political ecology) from outside the development establishment. By the end of 1989 I was back in the USA in a university setting, as an assistant professor of geography, with a mandate to work on both gender and political ecology. The idea of gender, environment and development was interesting to some of my peers in the discipline but mainly for its relevance to development, or to sustainable development of the large bilateral project variety, or to confirming a classical class-based critique. Gender became just another variable in the machinery of modernist development or another element in modernist Marxist development critique. When it came to talking about global environmental change and climate change, gender and class were seen as irrelevant details, unnecessarily complicating the Big (patriarchal) Picture. But something else was afoot. The academy was awash in waves of new feminist scholarship, from development studies, environmental studies, cultural studies, ecology, agriculture and religion, to social theory, critique of science and science and technology studies. In my

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first few years back in the USA and in the academy I read books by Vandana Shiva (1988), Carolyn Merchant (1989), Patricia Stamp (1986, 1989), Mies and Shiva (1993), as well as several ecofeminist articles (Warren 1987; King 1993; and see works by Judith Plant and Paula Gunn Allen). I also encountered the classic articles by Achola Pala Okeyo (1980) and Deere and Leon de Leal (1981), Judith Butler’s (1990) questioning of essential sex and gender categories, Val Plumwood’s (1993) critique of nature/culture and gender binaries; several key statements of women from the global South (Sen and Grown 1987; Wiltshire 1992); edited volumes on feminist approaches to sustainability (Harcourt 1993; Braidotti 1994); as well as books on feminist cultural critique of science (Haraway 1988, 1989, 1991; Harding 1988, 2008). Encouraged by Haraway’s academic citation of Marge Piercy’s (1976) novel, I began to incorporate my reading of feminist speculative fiction (works by Marge Piercy, Octavia Butler, Sherri Tepper, Ursula LeGuin and Doris Lessing) into an emerging feminist approach to political ecology. Inspired by a section on ‘Feminist Political Economy’ in Stamp’s (1989) treatment of gender, technology and development, I began to think in terms of ‘feminist political ecology’ and drafted an article (Rocheleau 1991) and a book proposal on ‘Gender, ecology and the science of survival’. Shortly thereafter, Barbara Thomas-Slayter and I began work with several Kenyan colleagues on Gender, environ­ ment and development in Kenya (Thomas-Slayter and Rocheleau 1995), later formed an editorial team with Esther Wangari, and eventually produced the FPE edited volume (Rocheleau et al. 1996). Meanwhile, spurred on by my reading and the increasing prom­ inence of social movements, especially in Latin America, in 1992 I went to conduct research with and for a rural social movement (the Rural Federation of Zambrana-Chacuey in the Dominican Republic) and the Carribbean branch of an African-based sustainable development NGO (ENDA-Caribe) in the central, more Afro-Caribbean region of the country (as opposed to the more white-identified Sierra region). I integrated my new-found readings in science and technology studies and feminist theory with an abiding interest in forest ecology and biodiversity, to document, with a team and the community itself, the diverse regional agroforest in what was being portrayed nationally as a deforested zone destroyed by ‘know-nothing peasants’. I also documented, with Laurie Ross and several Federation members,

rocheleau  |   51 founders and officers, the gendered history of the Federation and the land struggle that they waged. In this region, only three hours’ drive from the Sierra where I had worked before, women were ‘farmers’, if they wanted to be. Maria, an elder single woman, proudly proclaimed: ‘I am a farmer … a woman of the land.’ In Zambrana we arrived (Laurie Ross, Julio Morrobel, Ricardo Hernandez, Luis Malaret and myself) looking for gendered forestry and farming practices and enterprises. We found the gendered history of the Federation, a landscape shaped by gender, class, race and a neocolonial empire, and worlds of difference (spiritual, cultural) entwined in the fabric of visible landscapes and everyday lives in campesino communities. We also found a species-rich, diverse regional agroforest that was illegible to NGO, state and international agencies. We came looking for gender and found that, and much more. The direct collaboration with the Federation led to several results, including policy changes by the Federation. They provided better access for women to commercial tree planting opportunities on their farms, and they diversified the tree species and landscape niches to reflect the ecological, cultural and economic concerns of all the Federation members. The project proved to be a watershed for me, in that I was able to focus on both the social movement and the material ecologies and landscapes that they generated, in full collaboration with a peasant organization and an NGO (Rocheleau and Ross 1995; Rocheleau et al. 1996). In addition to gender and class, the affiliation and strength of involvement with the Federation were instrumental in shaping the assemblages of trees on farm plots and across the larger landscape. I was embarking on a gendered path of ecological research that would eventually lead me to frame farm and forest landscapes and ecologies in terms of general socio-ecological constructs of rooted networks, overlapping territories and rhizomatic socio-ecological assemblages. Building on this fieldwork I would increasingly enter into conversation with the thinking and writing of Arturo Escobar (1999, 2001, 2008), as well as Wendy Harcourt and the other members of the Women and the Politics of Place group (Harcourt and Escobar 2005), and the writings of Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 1993); Latour (1993, 2005, 2009); Mol and Law (2002); Law (1992); Santos (2007a, 2007b, 2010) and others to propose a more generalized rooted networks framework (Rocheleau and Roth 2007; Roth 2007; Rocheleau 2011).

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The paradox of FPE and my place in it The paradox of FPE, my own place in it, and my own situated place in the larger world(s) was crystallized in an Association of American Geographers session on FPE in 1996, as a kind of book launch of the FPE volume (Rocheleau et al. 1996). My then colleague and co-editor Esther Wangari said to me after my talk: ‘you really got to them, you had them shedding tears …’, referring to the audience of feminist, mostly American women and their reaction to my narratives and pictures of Kenyan women and the environmental, economic and political challenges they faced. I also described the women’s agency, innovation and success. One African woman in the audience, accompanied by two other African women who also seemed agitated, challenged me and the whole audience: ‘This is our life. We know all this. And now we have to reference her every time we write about it?’ Then the time was up and no discussion was had. I can’t remember how I responded, only what she said. It rang true, if uncomfortable, even distressing, a disruption of what was meant to be a triumphal debut of FPE. It was to be echoed many times in various places and less so in others and would rise to a climax in the post-colonial literature of the 1990s and in my own head and heart (Mohanty 1984, 1988, 2003; Rocheleau 2005). And so it went. I presented and wrote other people’s borrowed or donated stories, sometimes moved people to tears, and then sometimes to new thoughts and practices. Meanwhile, some women were moved to tears of rage that they might have to reference me (or others like me) about things they already knew from their own direct experience. Years later, in 2013, a young colleague and friend recounted to me a similar incident. A young Native American woman colleague was outraged (brought to tears) at the prominent role of a non-indigenous woman in a national conference panel on indigenous peoples’ s­ truggles. This is not history, and it is neither simple nor easy to resolve. After that debut of FPE I tried not to provoke, or to deserve, the tears of outrage of people whose home places I had invaded with my still-colonized and therefore weaponized eyes, brain and ­writing instruments. Yet they were sharpened with a double edge. I felt simul­ t­ aneously called to witness and report, yet forbidden on the basis of race and colonial legacy (Rocheleau 2005). I could not write the book I had planned to write on Kathama and Machakos. It needed to be thought and wrought differently and I was not yet ready. What

rocheleau  |   53 had come out already in edited volumes, our own and others, and journal articles would stand. However, I needed to think and write differently for the next cycle of my work. Several feminist critiques of ecofeminist approaches to gender, environment and development also surfaced during this period (Jackson 1993; Leach et al. 1995) and controversies raged over essentialist versus constructivist notions of gender and other elements of identity (Butler 1990). In the meantime the women’s groups in Kathama and much of Machakos had disbanded and re-formed (under self-management) and people in the community at large in Kathama were still dealing with recurrent droughts (three ‘hundred-year droughts’ in twenty-five years). The Dominican wood-producing communities of the Rural Federation in the Dominican Republic that I wrote about in the mid1990s were beset by another wave of contamination from reopening of the old Rosario gold mine under new management – Barrick. Lest anyone tell you that we have to forget the colonial past, this was the second gold mine in the ‘New World’ opened under the auspices of the Spanish crown with enslaved indigenous labourers overseen by the military. This enterprise is still destroying the lives, landscapes, health and livelihoods of people in the region after 500 years. For a decade after the publication of the FPE volume and several articles on gender, I proceeded to work on practical ecological applications and theoretical implications of FPE in cyborg forests,6 landscapes and ecologies. I continued to engage, during summer research travel and in writing, with the multiple local knowledges of the Rural Federation in Zambrana Chacuey in the Dominican Republic, and began to study (with Luis Malaret, several of my students, national colleagues and local communities) the invisible and diverse urban ecologies of Santiago, the second-largest Dominican city. In Santiago we went looking for gender and biodiversity in the urban forests of the city and the peri-urban zone. This time we found a highly racialized and classed socio-ecological formation and thriving communities of gardeners and gatherers along two rivers at the city’s edge, in the direct path of a four-lane highway, under construction. We learned that both the trees and the people that resided along the Jacagua river in this zone constituted ecologically and culturally rich and unique communities. Throughout the patio gardens of the smallholders and the nearby pastures and residential grounds of the former plantation we encountered rare indigenous and even e­ndangered trees

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species from the prior riparian forest as well as newly planted trees of both native and exotic species in the patio gardens. The people recounted the movements of their family members over eight generations, apparently since the time of slavery, from the upper reaches of the Jacagua river in the coastal mountain range to the valley floor in Santiago. The lore about caves and snakes in the mountains, and the timing of movement downslope, suggested Maroon communities of mixed African and indigenous origin. Even the river course bore the mark of the colonial legacy. The owners of the plantation in the late 1800s had moved the river course to avoid flooding of their pastures, and much later invited plantation ­labourers to build homes and small gardens in the dry river, hence the community name of Rio Seco (Dry River). The river was colonized, restructured, settled and became an agroforest. Nearby, along the Gurabo river, we encountered a process best described as river cleansing in which the recently settled Haitian families were actively and selectively evicted on public health and environmental grounds, while the Free Trade Zone factory complex along the river dumped organic and toxic waste straight into the river with impunity. We also encountered the seeds of decolonial social, ecological and political practice among a group of local residents who constituted a Haitian–Dominican solidarity organization, ONERESPE, led by both women and men of both ethnicities. The group laboured to bring social and environmental justice, along with healthcare, to the braided communities rooted along a one-mile segment of the river’s edge. The ecologies that we encountered reflected the diversity and the vibrancy of these two cultures, sheltered in the ribbons of riparian forests, and rooted in the small patio gardens of the riverbank settlers. Our research was concurrent with the river dredging and riverbank ‘cleaning’ operations, which we experienced first hand. The communities prevailed, at that time, through persistence and resilience in the face of the damage caused. They were not, at that time, moved from the river’s edge. In 2004 we were considering an expanded in-depth socio-ecological study in a swath from the city centre, extending through Jacagua and Gurabo, continuing up the slope. However, we faced deep divisions between our social justice and environmentalist colleagues, which seemed beyond our capability, as ‘outsiders’, to bridge. Within a year we would decide to enter into a very different place and process, as

rocheleau  |   55 observers and occasional accompanists, without scientific authority, and without funds. The decolonial turn The Zambrana and Santiago experience, coupled with the rise of social movements and involvement in Women and the Politics of Place, led to immersion in indigenous and campesino movements, literature, economies and ecologies. In 2005 we (my partner Luis Malaret and I) accepted an invitation from two anthropologist colleagues to explore socially just and ecologically feasible alternatives in the farm and forest landscapes of Chiapas. Two sabbaticals and several summers later we are immersed in another apprenticeship, observing, learning, contributing, accompanying and exchanging lessons across continents, oceans and situated lives, across lines of age, race, culture, class, language, ethnicity and distinct legacies of colonial heritage. While I went into this phase of learning and teaching to do practical work informed by critical theory, what was often wanted was a decolonial political ecology and feminist engagement with whole communities and broad trends. I began to think and write increasingly in terms of networks, territories, power and ecologies; resistance to land grabbing, and ethno-political cleansing; the political ecology of mega-projects (from tourism to energy plantations to mining and resettlement towns); and indigenous and alternative visions of possible futures (Rocheleau 2014). For me, as for many other feminist political ecologists, this is both an expansion and a step towards decolonization of FPE and PE in general (see Hawkins and Ojeda 2011). Moreover, these other paths often lead back to gender in a decolonial context, seeking to understand and to contribute, across worlds gendered otherwise, and not in Northern or Western feminist terms (Valadez 2014). As such our writings are not necessarily conceptualized or labelled as gender, women or feminist focused.7 While some (Elmhirst and Resurreccion 2008; Elmhirst 2011; Mollett and Faria 2012) interpreted the apparent silence of genderlabelled FPE as the disappearance, domestication or stagnation of the field, many of us were applying and expanding it, and rethinking our situated positions. Some of the pioneering FPE authors (Agarwal 2010; Deere and Leon de Leal 1981, 2001) maintained a genderand class-based approach, focused on gender equality in resource distribution. However, several FPE scholars expanded from gender

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to address indigenous and peasant identities (Roth 2007; Paulson and Gezon 2005) or race (Finney 2014; Di Chiro 2008, 2009; Miller et al. 1996), or both (Sundberg 2004; Mollett 2010; Asher 2007). ­Others have shifted from gender to the study of animals and the lives of people in more-than-human worlds (Haraway 2007; Whatmore 2002; Emel 1995; Emel and Urbanik 2005; Wolch and Emel 1998; Hovorka 2006, 2008; Ogden 2011) and feminist analyses of nature/ culture (Katz 1998; Moeckli and Braun 2001; Pinkaew Laungaramsri 2015). Yet others have followed gender out of the fields and into the worlds of food and kitchens from contemporary to historical contexts (Jarosz 2011; Elise and Carney 2007; Paulson 2003; Slocum 2008; Christie 2008, 2006). Post-colonial FPE built on the intersectional principles of the Combahee River Collective (1986) as well as post-structural development critiques (Escobar 2011 [1995]) to address issues of gender, race, land and forests from Central America (Mollett 2010) and Colombia (Asher 2007, 2009; Escobar 2008) to India (Singh 2013; Gururani 2002). Elmhirst and Resurreccion (2008) brought an intersectional approach to livelihoods and migration in Asia. Meanwhile, Wendy Harcourt’s (2009) new lens on body politics in development featured the importance of embodied experiences of gender and environment, building on prior work by Betsy Hartmann (1987, 2001) and others (Seager 1993; Silliman and King 1999) on the ‘dangerous intersections’ of population, environment, development and ‘security’. Some FPE researchers have incorporated studies of gender, tourism and nature parks into novel analyses of the making of state power (Ojeda 2012, 2013). Others have pursued the North/South connections in mothering (Underhill-Sem 2001, 2003) and care economies linked to environment, development and livelihoods (Hawkins 2011; Harcourt 2012). Feminist geographers working on space and place have also informed and drawn from FPE, from post-capitalist politics (GibsonGraham 2006) to feminist analysis of space and place (Massey 1994, 2004) and intersectionality (Kobayashi and Peake 1994). New waves of feminist researchers have advanced critical (poststructural, post-colonial and/or feminist) analyses of forestry (Nelson 2012; Arora-Jonsson 2012; Nightingale 2003, 2010; Agarwal 2010), water (Sultana 2009; Mehta 2005; Harris 2009) and climate (Seager 2006, 2010). On the other side of the coin, scholars with an indigen­ ous or peasant focus have entered into dialogues in the borderlands

rocheleau  |   57 between decoloniality and feminist intersectionality (Walsh 2010), as well as queer theory (Nirmal 2013). Yet others have explored the changing situations of women encountering shock waves of neoliberal expansion and creating spaces of gender equality, otherwise, within social movements for land, resources and dignity (Gutiérrez 2012, 2014; Valadez 2014; Pérez Espinosa 2010; Martinez Torres and Rosset 2010; Nagar with Ali et al. 2009; Simpson et al. 2009). Conclusion In looking to FPE as a platform to pursue further insights it is crucial to cast the net wide and to include women’s social movements and women in social justice and environmental movements, as well as scholars across multiple disciplines who have not identified themselves or been identified with FPE. The field must also embrace new waves of feminist and gender-based scholarship on indigenous studies as well as indigenous women’s own work (embodied, spoken or written) (Simpson et al. 2009; LaDuke 2002; Middleton 2010). FPE also extends to socio-ecological studies informed by complexity theory (Rocheleau and Roth 2007; Rocheleau 2011) and a rising tide of scholarship informed by queer theory (Nirmal 2013; see also Brigitte Baptiste in Hawkins and Ojeda 2011). FPE as a networked and expanded feminist endeavour to deal with the social relations of power and justice connected to cultures, ecologies and economies is alive and well. It is currently rising to the challenge of decolonial thinking and politics, to the politics of being, differently. Reflections on my own experiences are presented as a window on to the beginnings of that process. The work of several scholars (both new and seasoned) cited here, as well as other authors featured in this volume, is carrying this forward into new theoretical and practical domains. The moral of the story is that FPE is more about a feminist perspective and an ongoing exploration and construction of a network of learners than a fixed approach to a single focus on women and/ or gender. This constant circulation of theory, practice, policies and politics, and the mixing of various combinations of gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, ontologies and ecologies, with critique of colonial legacies and neoliberal designs, has characterized many feminist political ecologists. It is a work in process (not progress) and hopefully on a path, however circuitous, to decolonization.

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Notes 1  For more on this community and migrant communities in New York, see Georges (1990, 1992). 2  See Duchhart et al. (1988) and Rocheleau and Hoek (1984) for detailed descriptions of this work and the result­ ing designs. 3  For more on ethnobotany, see Rocheleau et al. 1989, and for the subsequent work of the students at other sites see Kipkore et al. (2014) and Maundu (1995, 1997). 4  Working with two teams of botany majors and one home economics major in two districts, we encountered 185 species of edible and/or medical wild or semi-domesticated plants, most of them known and used by women. 5  We built on Hoskins’ prior work with Fred Weber in West Africa and on her extensive work in gender and Com­ munity Forestry at FAO (Hoskins 1979, 1980; Weber and Hoskins 1983). 6  Following Haraway (1991), I have adapted the term ‘cyborg forest’ to refer to the melding of technology, human agency and plant and animal life assemblages now inextricably bound up together (though malleable and changeable in specific composition) in the forests described here. 7  See publications by Marcos (2009, 2010), Marcos and Aurora (2011), Olivera (2005) and Pérez Espinosa (2010) on indigenous and Zapatista women, and Millan (2014) and Walsh (2010) on deco­ lonial feminism.

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2 | CONTESTING GREEN GROW TH, CONNECTING CARE, COMMONS AND ENOUGH

Christa Wichterich

Introduction The multiple post-2007 crises shattered – once again – the imaginary of economic, ecological and social efficiency of the markets and the myth of endless growth. They revealed the destructive dynamics of globalizations based on growth-obsessed neoliberal economics and dominance- and extractivism-driven society–nature relations. The shock waves of those crises triggered off a plethora of transformation discourses, concepts and practices that are all presumed to manage or counter the crises. However, the topography of actors and policies of short-term crisis management and long-term solutions is highly contradictory, contested and laden with dilemma, ambiguities and conflicting discourses. Various global governance actors have presented concepts of a green economy that call themselves transformatory and – with regard to women – inclusive, while many institutionalized civil society organizations and transnational NGOs run into a crisis of vision. Global governance regimes – G20, climate change negotiations, trade negotiations at the Doha round of WTO, the Rio+20 conference – are trapped in a multilateral system that is unable to respond to the crises. At the same time, the economization and commodification of whatever had been outside of the market – nature, global public goods and natural commons such as the atmosphere and oceans, social relations and social reproduction – became the most significant marker for the management of the various crises. A revealing mechanism with regard to gender is that – despite the standstill of multilateral negotiations and a widespread gender fatigue in international relations and development cooperation – the World Bank (2006, 2011b), the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) (www.gendercc.net) and the UN Convention on Biodiversity (UNCBD) (Wichterich 2009) launched gender action

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plans and made significant efforts to present programmes to close gender gaps, and forge equal participation in decision-making. At an interface of policy-making at the global governance level with transnational civil society activism, gender and women are hereby included in neoliberal agendas and structurally adjusted to the corporate, commercial and financial governance of markets and nature. Against the background of this contradictory post-2007 crisis situation, feminist concepts are challenged to reposition themselves in the global multipolar reconfiguration of power, a stronger economic and financial governance vis-à-vis political governance, and an increased economization of nature, environment, life and social relations. Feminist political economists responded to the crash of the financial market and its impact on the real economies by highlighting the fatal externalization of the care economy, social costs and the economic logic of care out of the market economy (Elson 2010; Espey et al. 2010). While feminist political economics neglected or ignored to a large extent ecological concerns, the voices of feminist political ecologists were not very strong in the recent critiques of growth and economization of life, and in the attempts by civil society forces to establish a counter-hegemony of environmental and climate justice. The point of departure for this chapter is a long personal and academic experience in travelling and translating between the global North and the global South. It is nurtured by an activist and ­academic engagement with different strains of leftist and ecofeminist thinking; of linking the critique of patriarchy and capitalism as Maria Mies did in her writings (1986); of critique of ecofeminist essentialism on the one hand and involvement in strategic essentialism and identity- and rights-based activism on the other hand; of linking the critique of macroeconomics and trade policies from the perspective of feminist political economy with post-structuralist, deconstructivist and subjectivity-centred approaches. Departing from this in-between position, and grounded in the analysis of various crisis situations in Asia, Africa and recently in Europe, I would like to suggest with regard to the current multiple crises a perspective that interweaves feminist political ecology and feminist political economics on a meso-analytical level. Adopting this methodological approach, the chapter first gives a critique of green economy, green growth concepts and the economization of non-human and human nature, and secondly links three strategic alternative

wichterich  |   69 practices and transformatory as well as emancipatory perspectives in order to develop an economic and ecological counter-logic against the logic of return on investment and GDP growth. Feminist political ecology meets feminist political economics Feminist political ecology analyses gender as a central social categ­ ory that informs and shapes societal–nature relations as well as agency, knowledge and politics related to the environment. Gender regimes are analysed as embedded in and intersecting with various socio-economic and sociocultural regimes of power and hierarchy in a specific historic, geographic and political context. This makes for a non-essentialist and contextualized perspective on gender. A critical focus of feminist political ecologists is on gender in interrelated power relations, particularly in conflict, crisis and transformative situations (Agarwal 1992; Rocheleau 2008; Rocheleau et al. 1996), and on the mechanism of constructing oppositions and dualisms, dominance and subordination through defining women and the private sphere, as well as nature and ecosystems, as the ‘other’ (Plumwood 1996). A critical deconstruction of othering – a principle identified by the post-colonial school of thought (Mohanty 1984) – along with a critique of naturalization and homogenization of the other is widely used by feminist political ecologists as cross-cutting methodology (Nightingale 2011). The concept of ‘othering’ converges with the crucial critique of feminist economists of the disregard for and externalization of social reproduction, care work, household and subsistence economy as unproductive, outside the market and without economic value (Elson 1995; Ferber and Nelson 1993). Care – mostly unpaid and female – and its underlying economic logic are defined and devalued by neoclassical economists as the other to the market rationale of efficiency, competition and accumulation of material wealth. This mechanism reinforces gender stereotypes and gendered hierarchies (Mellor 2009; Sassen 1998). The intersectional and contextualized analysis of gender in global and local power structures has been key to feminist political economy as well. The feminization of employment in the new international division of production and services, the feminization of migration and transnational care chains, as well as the recent feminization of microfinance and indebtedness are underpinned by the i­nterweaving

70   |  two

of gender, class and caste, race and ethnicity, colonialism and imperial­ ism (for global care chains, see Yeates 2009: 41ff.). At the same time, owing to the recent neoliberal developments and a fragmentation of identity-based social movements, gender with a LGBTI perspective has undergone new framings beyond essentialism and dualisms in discourses, bodies and subjectivities. Examples of these new materializations of the body as nature and subject positions are changes in social and biological sex through transsexual practices and technologies, or the clinical and regenerative work women do as egg producers and surrogate mothers based on reproductive technologies within a transnational reproductive industry in order to serve the desire of childless or gay couples (Waldby and Cooper 2010). Both feminist political ecology and feminist political economics that understand gender as a social category of inequality have to position themselves in this new landscape and have to come to grips with those changes and power shifts (Hawkins and Ojeda 2011). They have to challenge the claims of neoliberal transformation and emancipation, and the complex dynamics of othering, inclusion and exclusion, internalization and externalization in response to the multiple crises. The chapter is based on the assumption that the one feminist school cannot do without the other. In the first section, I examine the global-governance-shaped transformation concept of green economy as mainstream management-oriented paradigm, which gears towards continued growth and maximization of efficiency in resource use. The critical analysis will highlight the speedy process of economization of nature and financialization of environmental policies and – at the same time – mechanisms of inclusion of marginalized and poor groups such as women in transnational value chains and new market-based instruments related to climate protection in the framework of the Kyoto protocol. From a gender perspective, I stress the persistent paradoxes and ambivalences of inclusion and empowerment on the one hand, and othering and subordination on the other hand. Green growth and the economization of nature At the peak of the multiple crises in 2008/09, a number of global governance players presented a variety of ‘green economies’ or ‘green new deals’ to find ways out of the triple crisis of finance, energy and climate change. The ‘Global Green New Deal’ initiated by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP 2009) phrased

wichterich  |   71 three objectives: a) economic recovery, b) inclusive and sustainable growth and poverty reduction, c) a reduction in carbon dependency and ecosystem degradation. Both the OECD report Towards a Green Economy (2011) and the EU Commission’s report ‘Europe 2020 – A European strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth’ (2010) declare a departure from business as usual but still set growth as the overall goal for the greening of investments and industries. The UNEP report Towards a Green Economy calls the green economy ‘a new economic paradigm’ deriving from the ‘disillusionment with the prevailing economic paradigm’ and market failures (2011: 1). UNEP identifies as a key root cause of the interlocking crises a ‘gross misallocation of capital’ and proposes as a solution a redirection of investment, jobs and technologies from brown to green business sectors (ibid.: 8). Those reports and programmes are peppered with a language of shift and change. Notions of innovation, transition and transformation signal a knowledge- and techno-science-based change of course. Many notions of civil society discourses – from ‘empowerment’ to ‘paradigm shift’, from ‘prices should speak the ecologic truth’ to ‘consumers’ power’ and ‘social inclusiveness’ – are adopted and co-opted, while their implicit critique of power and property relations in production, trade and distribution, as well as the critique of violent societal and technical domination of nature, is softened and greenwashed. In particular, UNEP’s key message is that the green economy is a correction of earlier mistakes and market failures, and that global governance organizations have the conceptual, regulatory and management capacities to orchestrate the change. Against the backdrop of a kind of paralysis of the G20 vis-à-vis the multiple crises and a crisis of multilateralism itself – as seen in the negotiations on climate change, Rio+20 and in the WTO – green economy itself appears to be a new hegemonic global governance regime and represents a reregulation of the economy by politics. Green economy concepts give preference to market and technological efficiency over a consistent human rights approach and over a coherent concept of justice and social sustainability. Power relations are not taken into account. The rationale of global connectivity and sustainability is investment, value chains and returns on investment (Brand 2012; Unmüssig et al. 2012; Khor 2011). The green economy concepts as formulated by UNEP, the OECD and the EU are grounded in two complementary normative strategies:

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an ecologization of the economy and an economization of nature. First, as macroeconomic concepts of change, they are geared towards making economic growth sustainable. With confidence in the power of market dynamics and supported by regulatory policies, the turbulences of the multiple crises are used for a green reconfiguration of capitalism (Goodman and Salleh 2013). The OECD argues that a greening of the economy is not only politically wise, but inevitable for maximizing the ailing growth rates. Greening of capital allocation and of a broad range of business sectors is seen as a key engine for GDP growth. The EU calls this ‘smart, sustainable and inclusive growth’ (European Commission 2010) and the World Bank sees ‘inclusive green growth’ as the ‘pathway to sustainable development’ (2011a). The transition to a green economy is intertwined with the concept of public–private partnerships since private capital is more important for green investments than public funds. The growing relevance of the corporate sector was mirrored in the language of the three main conferences on sustainability: UNCED 1992 in Rio de Janeiro focused on the ‘participation’ of all civil society forces, including business, in the shaping of a global governance regime for sustainability; ten years later in Johannesburg ‘public–private partnership’ became key; in 2012 in Rio de Janeiro the corporate pre-conference was entitled ‘Business takes the lead’, thus filling the gap caused by the crisis of multilateralism. In addition to ‘privatizing the governance of green growth’ (Alexander and Fuhr 2012), the promise to make the economy ecological brings big INGOs such as WWF, Rainforest Alliance and Oxfam, as well as CSOs, on board with those corporations that declare corporate environmental and social responsibility a business policy. Secondly, the idea of systematic economization of nature takes up a crucial concept of ecological economics and green politics, namely that environmental costs that have been externalized from economic calculations have to be internalized into value creation and prices (Daly 1997/1991). Commodification, trading and financialization of nature and ecosystemic regeneration are part and parcel of the ongoing drive of capitalism towards an ‘accumulation by dispossession’ and a ‘spatio-temporal fix’ to its crisis of growth and profitability (Harvey 2003: 138ff., 148f.): markets expand and include everything that has been outside the accumulation process, such as the regeneration of nature, global natural commons, public goods and state-run enterprises and facilities, social reproduction, care and social relations.

wichterich  |   73 Since the first Rio conference in 1992, as much as development has been economized, nature has been increasingly privatized, commodified and marketized by fixing a monetary value to its parts and its functions that have been called by neoclassical economics ‘environmental services’ (Fairhead et al. 2012). Privatization of nature from land and water grabbing to patenting of life forms is grounded in a techno-scientific paradigm that underestimates the ecological and social risks and ‘overestimate[s] the resilience of ecological systems in which we are embedded’ (Plumwood 1996: 563). The ‘neoliberal turn’ in society–nature relations and environmental governance ‘conceptualise nature as a subsystem of the economy’ and embark on ‘selling nature to save it’, meaning a rationality of ‘pay to conserve’ (McAfee 1999, 2011; Castree 2008). Among those concepts are the ‘economics of climate change’ offered by Nicholas Stern (2006), the TEEB study (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, www.teebweb.org) and the related ‘natural capital accounting’ on a national level. The climate change negotiations nurture the concept of green commodification through carbon trading, joint implementation and the Clean Development Mechanisms (CDM, Payments for Ecosystem Services – PES, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation – REDD, REDD+). They open up a huge segment for the financial market. At the Rio+20 conference, banks, investment funds and insurance companies signed up to a ‘Natural Capital Declaration’ for the purpose of integrating natural capital into their financial valuations.1 Techno-science like genetic- and geo-engineering, new technologies for resource extractivism from fracking to deep-sea mining and for substitution of natural processes as in synthetic biology, nanotechnology and reproductive technologies intensify the ongoing commodification. They facilitate the adjustment of nature, human nature and the social to the neoliberal market rationale of monetary price, efficiency and profitability. Inclusive liberalism and value creation The intensification of economistic and neoliberal approaches in nature–society relations is unfolding with simultaneous intensification of neoliberal market approaches towards gender, indigeneity, poverty, labour and social justice concerns. Though gender gets little attention in the green economy concepts, a number of programmes and publications from development agencies focus on the intersection

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between growth, sustainability and gender, and feature inclusion of women predominantly in two ways: 1) in global value chains, and 2) in Clean Development Mechanisms and carbon trading. These forms of tapping untapped resources – the expression earlier coined by the World Bank – are modes of inclusive liberalism and the other side of the neoliberal coin: the opening of market segments for groups who earlier had been excluded, marginalized or had been constructed as vulnerable (Porter and Craig 2004). Those strategies of inclusion are made hegemonic and consensual by discourses of win-win in terms of monetary, social and symbolic gains. Development cooperation operates as a catalyst of inclusive liberalism in the global South by integrating women, indigenous people, informal and precarious workers, small-scale farmers, producers and traders in labour, commodity and service markets. Presently in development policies, the promotion of global value chains is seen as the most appropriate strategy to include poor and vulnerable economic actors, among them many women, in the markets in order to reduce their poverty (Royal Tropical Institute et al. 2012). It is stressed that gender equality is not only a human right and a development goal in itself but – simultaneously and equally valuable – ‘good for business’, a means to the economic goal (ibid.: xiv). This market-instrumentalist view of gender equality is adopted from the World Bank’s definition of gender equality as ‘smart economics’ and its appraisal of women’s inclusion in markets as the best recipe to increase efficiency and growth (World Bank 2006). As claimed by gender and development (GAD) activists, the gender-gap approach by the World Bank makes gender inequalities visible, depicts women as deficient and as vulnerable compared to men, and proposes measures and mechanisms to bridge the differences (World Bank 2011a). In contrast to its earlier refusal to refer to the human rights paradigm that had been the crucial framework of feminist advocacy in the 1990s, recently the World Bank picked up and inserted individual market-conforming rights into the neoliberal agenda. In the crisis, this more rights-sensitive but market-driven concept of gender equality and economic empowerment became hegemonic (Wichterich 2011). Informed by this market-instrumentalist concept of gender equality, a study on ‘Women’s participation in green growth – a potential fully realised?’ (DCED 2012) identifies a broad range of opportunities for women to participate in green growth, as flexible and contract

wichterich  |   75 labourers, micro- and franchise entrepreneurs, e.g. in organic textile chains, target groups of inclusive business models, service providers in ecotourism, customers of micro-finance for green innovations and green technology, as well as in micro-insurance for drought and other ‘natural’ calamities. The issue of social and gender justice is largely reduced to employment and entrepreneurship. However, the study has to concede that in the green economy similar constraints on women’s access to markets, assets, jobs and income exist as in the brown economy, and there is no evidence of green economic activities being instrumental to a change of gender roles in the household. Secondly, inclusive liberalism is facilitated by the financialization of climate protection within the UN Kyoto protocol – namely, clean development mechanisms as market-based instruments for mitigation. For land and forest protection, certificates are handed out to local and indigenous actors as a wage substitute. These certificates should earn them – after being traded in the financial market – a monetary return additional to the social and symbolic value in terms of recognition for their environmentally protective work. Images depicting women who are affected by climate change are once again ambiguous, framed by the concept of vulnerability closely linked to poverty and embedded in a concept of agency as resource managers and caretakers of the environment. Again there is a tendency towards naturalization of women’s roles while neglecting social and economic intersections (Dankelmann 2010; Terry 2009). Women as guardians of seeds, biodiversity and as gatekeepers of local knowledge, as kitchen gardeners and responsible for cooking energy in rural households, are addressed as specific target groups for financial value creation through the economization of nature. This makes for a commercialization of their unpaid environmental care work and their work for the reproduction of social and ecological commons (Federici 2011). Thus ‘integrating ecosystem services into development planning’ (GIZ 2012) becomes instrumental to getting the global South and earlier excluded and marginalized groups included in the logic of marketization and financialization of nature and environmental processes. Territories in the global South get used as a sink. These market-based strategies of mitigation have been highly contested and questioned by civil society groups, in particular those linked to indigenous people, forest-based communities and smallscale farmers.2 They highlighted that the expected income from this

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market contract does not depend on the labour of afforestation, forest protection or low-emission agriculture but on the dynamics of the financial market and speculation. Presently, the prices of certificates have collapsed because the market is already flooded with too many certificates, among them many dubious ones (Lang 2011). One example is the World Bank’s plan to integrate – in close cooperation with agribusiness – climate-smart agriculture and adaptation to climate change by dishing out certificates to local communities for soil conservation. Monsanto and other agribusinesses are interested in no-till agriculture which is already widespread (e.g. in Brazil), as it opens new markets for herbicides. In a pilot project on climate-smart agriculture by the Green Belt Movement in Kenya the women were supposed to bind huge amounts of CO2 through afforestation. However, the return they can expect from the certificates after years would not even cover their costs, while consultants and techno-scientific experts immediately earn a considerable income from this kind of response to the problems of climate mitigation and CO2 reduction in the global North (ibid.). This project marks a paradigmatic intersection of various power regimes: a gender regime, local and international division of labour, global governance and neocolonial or imperialistic tendencies, and the global financial regime. The following section therefore explores the implications in terms of emancipation and empowerment for this kind of neoliberal inclusion. Inclusion and neoliberal empowerment Feminist and women’s equality organizations have been divided over strategies of inclusive liberalism and the paradoxes of market integration because both subordination and exploitation, and emancipation and the construction of new subjectivities, unfold their own but interplaying dynamics. Nancy Fraser’s theorem of an ‘uncanny doubling’ of neoliberal and feminist emancipatory objectives in the growth-driven model of economic development and societal relations with nature marks exactly the dilemma and ambivalences of market integration of women (Fraser 2009: 115). This is obvious in overlapping discourses on individual freedom of choice, self-actualization, autonomous subjectivity and entrepreneurship of the self. Feminist economists like Ruth Pearson (2007) and Stephanie Seguino (2000) analysed transnational value chains and global production networks, e.g. manufacturing and services in special economic

wichterich  |   77 zones and call centres, as gendered processes wherein market and gender regimes converge. The flexibilization of gender roles through the feminization of employment opened up opportunities for economic empowerment and new strategies of social reproduction, for new subjectivities and identities. However, these opportunities depend on the adjustment of women to the masculine market norms and the habitus of the Homo oeconomicus (Mellor 2009). Gender flexibilization is sandwiched between the liberal norm of equality with regard to market agency and the logic of capitalist accumulation in an ecologically and socially unsustainable way. Neoliberal empowerment of women as market actors is instrumental to flexible, unregulated and precarious labour markets and thus – as the World Bank stresses – to the maximization of productivity and growth. However, exploitation and discrimination are not unilinear processes but are in a complex interplay with recognition and empowerment. Value creation in transnational chains and accumulation goes hand in hand with the appreciation of women and their work, an equation that corresponds with the ‘Engelian myth’ that inclusion in the labour force means liberation for women (Pearson 2007). While green economy concepts are optimistic regarding social inclusion, the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) (2012) cautions against the socially unfair impact of the green economy. At an intersection of social, economic, geographic and gender factors, it could adversely affect those who already suffer most from environmental degradation and climate change while being least responsible for its causes. For example, small-scale female agriculture and food security systems are the ‘first casualties’ of the green growth sector of renewable energies and investments in the cultivation of agrofuels such as palm oil, jatropha and sugar cane (Tandon 2012a, 2012b). Decarbonization in the North through investment and the setting up of agrofuel value chains in the global South happens at the cost of food security in the South with an adverse impact on women as peasants and caretakers. This reflects the imperialist mode of how the global North attempts to sustain its lifestyle by claiming resources, labour and sinks in the global South. Thus, an analysis of the adverse effects on social reproduction in the South has to embed gender in class, race and neocolonial or imperialist regimes. This holds true for inclusion in the financialization of climate change and nature as well. GAD proponents argue from a liberal perspective

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for balancing the structural asymmetries in green economies by means of gender mainstreaming and gender budgeting (Schalatek 2009; Kuhl 2012), and bridging gender gaps in employment, wage and entrepreneurship, as well as for participation in carbon trade and the Clean Development Mechanism. For this purpose the lobby organization Women Organizing for Change in Agriculture and Natural Resource Management initiated ‘women’s carbon standard’.3 Corporates from the North that invest in women-run biogas or waste management on the household level in South-East Asia as CDM projects can acquire a women’s empowerment label to brush up their corporate social and environmental sustainability account. The ambiguity rests in women’s unpaid care work (e.g. that their labour of servicing biogas plants), using them as cooking energy, gets recognition by being commodified, certified and traded in the market as part of neoliberal climate policies. Framed by an imaginary of equality and win-win, such inclusive and green deals between unequal partners are highly ambivalent and entail an unfair and unequal outcome. From a subjectivity-centred point of view they are supposed to provide women, indigenous people and small-scale and informal market actors with monetary and symbolic return, recognition and empowerment as Homini oeconomici. However, from the perspective of political economy, those deals guarantee the global North and the global consumerist middle classes an ‘imperial mode of living’ to the cost of others and cover up growing socioeconomic inequalities and power relations (Harvey 2003; Brand and Wissen 2012). Integration into the markets and into their logic of efficiency and competition without acquiring decision-making power is a disciplinary process that implies both agency and power to act, and at the same time subordination to the market norms and selfgovernmentality in a Foucauldian sense. By including local gatekeepers such as indigenous people and women in mechanisms of access to biodiversity, in value production chains and in carbon trading, the global North, corporates and global consumer classes get access to the resources, bio- and genetic diversity of the global South and its potential as a sink. Though this kind of green deal promises to the local actors a return from the financialization of forest or land protection and the trade in certificates, it provides neither rights that would constitute a global citizenship nor decision-making power that would secure sustainable livelihoods for the poor. In contrast to the liberal concept of equality, feminist political econ-

wichterich  |   79 omists claim a shift of paradigm with a micro- and a macroeconomic dimension: this must conceptualize inclusive and pro-poor growth bottom-up from the micro-level of local livelihoods, communities and social reproduction instead of imposing market- and techno-scienceshaped value creation. This has to be framed by macroeconomic policies on redistribution, protection of natural and other commons, and a strict regulation of financial markets, foreign direct investment and trade policies (Tandon 2012a). Othering and exclusion ‘Othering’ and exclusion are the other side of inclusion. Both strategies make for a reaffirmation of the growth-obsessed development model and the neo-extractivist model of societal–nature relations through reconfiguration as green economy in the multiple crises. A common feature of green economy concepts is that care and the household economy are externalized in a neoclassical way out of value production and constructed as the ‘other’ to market efficiency and accumulation. Even the Green New Deal of the EU Greens is governed by an ‘androcentric’ market logic, while the social dimension of sustainability, social rights, care and gender justice is sidelined as having little importance (Kuhl 2012). The financial crisis whereby capital is searching for new investment areas has been a driver for land and water grabbing by investors. This entails appropriation and displacement of local communities as well as the erosion of their livelihoods rooted in the land–water–energy nexus and in biodiversity. The increased demand for agrofuels for reduction of CO2 emissions and climate protection has added a specific dynamic to this tendency of commercialization and privatization of land and other commons. A crucial justification for land grabbing is that many land ­areas are mainly wastelands, underused or not efficiently used commons (Behrmann et al. 2012). They are defined as the other to the market and its logic of efficiency, value and wealth accumulation – analogous to the assessment of women’s unpaid labour as other to the market, as being wasted in subsistence, care and social reproduction and as underused potential. Othering land, nature and women constructs a hierarchical set of cultural values and mechanisms of externalization, exclusion and expulsion. Construction of inferiority through othering legitimizes domination (Plumwood 1996; Kurian and Munshi 2005).

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With regard to land, outside and foreign investment and privat­ ization are supposed to entail high productivity, value creation and development gains that benefit the marginalized local population. This rationale implies a devaluation of small-scale agriculture as inefficient and not profitable, and a disregard of other forms of production and reproduction. Generally the market logic of profit determines quantity and quality of production, namely an economy of scale. It gives preference to fast-growing species for fast income over slow-growing varieties, and catapults the local producers and peasants into competition with investors and land grabbers who invest in large, fast-growing, profitable tree plantations. The productivity and productive use of ‘waste’ land as common grazing ground or woods as ‘wild’ garden where women gather plants, fruits, fodder, nuts and minor forest products are ignored. However, in particular non-landowning women depend significantly on commons for access to water, energy and fodder for daily provision and the little marketing they are able to do (Federici 2011). Enclosure of commons, patenting genetic material, living organisms and knowledge as private intellectual property initiates a conversion of collective property rights into private property and legitimizes exclusion (Wichterich 2009). Seemingly without violence, and geared towards market contracts between equals, those mechanisms and the corresponding legal provisions establish a hegemony of the market logic over any other economic logic that is more embedded in nature and moral social relations. Land dispossession and the monocultural production of palm oil or jatropha destroy biodiversity as well as land-use diversity. Small-scale farmers who plant local varieties for local markets and subsistence are evicted from fertile soil or even completely from agriculture. This is the way that the demand for agrofuels in particular by the EU and corporate interests displaces the relicts of subsistence, and the income opportunities of small-scale farmers and indigenous people. Livelihoods, modes of production, exchange and sustainable usage of natural resources that were not completely subjected to and disciplined by the capitalist logic of competition, efficiency and profit, but were partly still governed by a logic of social and moral embeddedness, sufficiency and reciprocity, are undermined and marginalized by the privatization of resources and by commodified value chains. An analysis of those othering and exclusion dynamics and discourses can not separate the interplaying regimes of social, economic,

wichterich  |   81 political, ecological and cultural power and subordination. On the other hand, those processes, spaces and persons that have been ­othered and subordinated by the market and growth logic can be points of departure for feminist political ecologists and feminist political economists to go beyond a critique of the neoliberal green economy to significant socio-economic transformation: the care economy, local livelihoods, sufficiency and subsistence, non-expert knowledge, commons, nature, and indigenous peoples’ and women’s central role in those (Harcourt 2012). Against this background a crucial site for the exploration of transformative and emancipatory opportunities is the ongoing multiple crises of social reproduction and struggles around resources, knowledge and territories, and local and global resistance to the processes of othering, exploitation and exclusion. The following section will compile various practices and concepts of small glocal transformations that have in common being grounded in the logic of care, commons and suffi­ ciency, and open up new arenas to interlace feminist political economy and feminist political ecology. While most of the alternatives to market, corporate and growth-driven economics and society–nature relations are assumed to be in the global South, the next section will highlight ongoing critical discourses and transformative practices in Europe. Great transformation or small transitions – a European perspective In Europe, the analysis of the multidimensional crises as a systemic crisis has rebooted discourses in civil society, social movements and critical academic communities about a paradigm shift to overcome the hegemonic development model that is driven by the logic of growth, profit maximization and the societal domination and commodification of nature. This topical ‘de-growth’ discourse is actually the third wave of growth critique: the first one emerged around the famous Club of Rome’s publication The Limits to Growth in 1972, feeding into concepts of steady state and de-growth (Daly 1977/1991; Georgescu-Roegen 1979/1995). In the 1990s ecological economists, post-developmentalists and ecofeminists criticized unsustainable and neocolonial patterns of overproduction and over-consumption. As an alternative model they drafted concepts of a sufficiency economy (Sachs 1992) and a subsistence perspective (Mies and Shiva 1993; Bennholdt-Thomsen and Mies 2000).

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The present discourses on de-growth and post-growth concepts are responses to the interlocking crises and to still-growth-driven ‘green economy’ concepts. As the economization of untapped natural and social resources and further liberalization of access to and trade in resources can’t solve the systemic crisis, ecologists highlight once again the limits to growth (e.g. peak oil, peak water and peak land, the loss of biodiversity and climate change). The efforts to decouple GDP growth from resource use and emissions with the help of techno-science and market instruments are not successful at the end of the day. In some sectors, an increase in efficiency even causes a rebound effect that offsets the environmental benefits made by new technology, for example, and leads to even more consumption (Jackson 2009; Coutrot and Gadrey 2012). The alarming prospects of resource scarcity did not trigger sufficiency, modesty and protection but a more aggressive resource extractivism. The fall-out after Fukushima is an example of the persistent recklessness and high degree of risk enshrined in high tech. It shows dramatically that there are no techno fixes to repair the life-threatening technology and mode of development. Presently, de-growth is a concept and a grassroots social movement in the North. ‘Sustainable de-growth may be defined as an equitable down-scaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being, and enhances ecological conditions at the local and global level, in the short and long term’ (Schneider et al. 2010: 512). While de-growth concepts are shaped as a ‘driver for change’, they are neither an elaborated theory nor an action plan for the transformation of economy and ecology, but rather a ‘political slogan with theoretical implications’ which opens up spaces for theoretical and practical explorations (Martinez-Alier et al. 2010: 1742, 1745). These approaches link a critique of heterodox economics, concerns about neo-extractivist and highly exploitative uses of nature and a critique of the catch-up model of development (Kallis 2011). They suggest a variety of strategies to address material processes, structures and discourses, as well as individual habitus and collective values. The idea of ‘more’ has become an end in itself not only in neoclassical economics, the capitalist drive for accumulation and GDP, but also in individual life planning and the desire for a good life based on consumption patterns that have been globalized in the past decades. Deeply rooted in Western culture and philosophy, the concept of growth that equates to economic progress and material wealth as well

wichterich  |   83 as to individual development and lifestyle has become a global norm of societal and individual development (Welzer 2011). The progressive scaling up of consumption that involved the consumption classes in the North and the South likewise is based on a renewed colonization and exploitation of the ‘other’, the global South, ‘cheap’ labour and nature (Brand and Wissen 2012). The North has to pioneer the move for a farewell to the idea of permanent economic growth because of its historical debt with regard to the expansion of capitalist development, emissions of greenhouse gas and exploitation of resources in the global South (Salleh 2009). The shrinking of growth structures in production, trading and consumption has to be accompanied by a shrinking of the ‘mental infrastructures’ of growth, accumulation and the logic of material more (Welzer 2011; Kagan 2012) and the ‘collective imagination’ (Martinez-Alier et al. 2010: 1742). Feminist critiques of the masculine culture of techno-science and dominance over nature, and their perspectives of subsistence, sufficiency and ‘liberation from consumption’ (Mies and Shiva 1993: 251), played a prominent role in the second wave of growth critique and in envisioning ‘transitions to sustainable production and consumption’ from a Western perspective (Charkiewicz et al. 2001). However, presently feminist discourses on transformation are hardly mirrored in the ongoing de-growth and post-growth debates in Europe. Contrary to the narratives of a ‘great transformation’ – be it ‘greening’ or degrowth – feminist reflections and practices start from the bottom, from local livelihoods, from a rationale of survival and care. Unwilling to wait for the ‘great transformation’ and tired of green and leftist blueprints, they follow the TAMA principle: there are many alternatives. A basic assumption is that there is neither a one-size-fits-all recipe nor the one and only lever that would make the rest happen automatically. On the contrary, various and multipolar entry points, opportunity spaces and transition strategies have to be identified to shape alternative practices and other development paths. However, core in feminist discourses and practices is not a degrowth or post-growth perspective as a political goal or an economic theory but rather a search for good living, secured livelihoods and the ‘sustainability of life’ with a double focus on interdependencies between people and between people and ecosystems (Muraca 2012; Bidegain and Nayar 2013: 39). Elements of the de-growth debate and

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post-growth practices – such as the focus on quality instead of quantity, cooperation instead of competition, public instead of private, social justice and redistribution instead of private accumulation – influence this search and a broad range of concepts and practices that connect the three most relevant feminist discourses of the recent past: 1) the care economy, 2) commons and commoning, and 3) a critique of neoliberal globalization, and its production and consumption patterns. These three concepts are inherently linked by their own rationales that countervail the logic of ever-lasting market growth and the preference given to accumulation of capital and material goods. These counterrationales reflect Nidhi Tandon’s slogan ‘harmonising our footprints: reducing the ecological while accumulating the care’ (Tandon 2013). A crucial frame of reference for those feminist discourses in Europe is the multiple crisis of social reproduction related to the erosion of the much-lauded European welfare model and neoliberal austerity policies as a panacea against the economic crisis: growing social disparities and new poverty, downsizing of public services, a shortage of caregivers and nurses for the elderly and kids, a crisis of public healthcare, an increase in burn-out syndromes and depression, food scandals, an emergency in urban habitat due to the crisis of real estate, gentrification and rent increase, high youth unemployment, reduction of real wages while living costs are on the rise, reduction in pensions and old age allowances (Madörin et al. 2012; Bakker and Silvey 2008; Bakker 2007; Bezanson and Luxton 2006). The work and lives of large sections of European societies have become more precarious and less resilient (Karamessini and Rubery 2013; Hermann 2013). Particularly in crisis-prone southern Europe, new social movements protest against austerity policies and the dominance of financial governance, against the degradation of commons, resource extractivism and social polarizations. The occupation of public squares in southern Europe, in the Middle East and northern Africa has become a metaphor for the claiming of ‘real’ democracy, including a democratization of the economy and of decision-making about public and natural resources (Social Movement Studies 2011; Ramadan 2013; www. tweetsandthestreets.org). At the same time, at the grassroots level citizens’ initiatives and place-based practices are set up to explore alternatives to the growth-obsessed, resource- and emission-intensive mode of production and social reproduction (Azzellini and Sitrin 2014; Kagan 2012).

wichterich  |   85 More than during the second women’s movement, feminists join social and environmental protests and movements, and don’t start separate initiatives. However, they are in the forefront when it comes to organizing local livelihoods, a healthy environment and food sover­ eignty, and coping with the multiple crises of social reproduction. What makes them work together on a basis of solidarity is a concrete cooperation and struggle for specific changes rather than politics of identity. The following section will explore three topical discourses and arenas of feminist practice by unbundling economic and ecological linkages with regard to care, commons and sufficiency. They are strategic entry points to socio-ecological and socio-economic transformation. As strategic sites for transition and subversive strategies they are geared towards liberation from the present hegemonic regime of production, social reproduction and consumption, as well as from the prevailing exploitative and violent society–nature relations. Labour and the logic of care Social reproduction, natural generation and the respective care work mark an intersection of economic and ecological concerns of feminists. Feminist economists’ discourses about the divide between production and reproduction, public and private, paid and unpaid, market and non-market, and about the externalization of the care economy, hit the nail of the multiple crises of social reproduction right on the head (Federici 2010). Their critique of the genderhierarchical division of labour, the gender wage gap and the devalor­ ization of care work underpins the public awareness about social polarization and economic injustice, symbolized in bankers’ bonuses and remuneration below the minimum wage, e.g. of home carers. Care work as the ‘other’ to the market is a crucial site from which to explore the environment–gender nexus, economic power relations and values which are ascribed to different types of work and workers (Charkiewicz 2009; Bidegain and Nayar 2013). The rationale of care for humans and nature that produces, reproduces and sustains life and livelihoods gives preference to provision, need satisfaction and enforcement of rights over the principle of efficiency and the egoistic utility maximization of the Homo oeconomicus enshrined in the careless and reckless accumulation economy (Mellor 2009). The care logic is pivotal to social reproduction as well as to environmental sustainability

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and inspires a ‘distinctively feminist economics’ (Donath 2000; Power 2004). According to Nidhi Tandon, a holistic care economy should include care for communities, for future generations in a finite world and for nature (Tandon 2013: 22). One should add from a feminist perspective that women are very aware of the body as their ‘first environment’ and as the most immediate nature they experience. A triple-R reorganization of all necessary labour in society is crucial to any solution to the multidimensional crisis of social reproduction: a redefinition, redistribution and revalorization. Labour not only coconstructs economic relations and society–nature relations, but also socialization, social and gender identities, and subjectivities. A redefinition of labour has to include the whole of work, marketand care-based, waged and unremunerated, high and low productivity. The feminist perspective is to overcome the divide between production and reproduction along with the gender stereotypes and hierarchies intertwined with it. It aims at new social contracts – written and unwritten – that distribute and valorize responsibilities and breadwinning work and care more equally and fairly. In highly industrialized and productive economies fewer and fewer people are needed to produce and trade goods. Universal full-time employment – still declared an objective by trade unions – is an illusion. At the same time, the need for care work that responds to the needs in society and the environment is on the increase. To rebalance this in future, a redistribution of care work, unpaid and paid, informal and formal, is necessary. Shahra Razavi has proposed a care diamond of key actors and institutions in providing care – family, non-profit actors, state and market – as a framework of reference to analyse and change the distribution of care work and responsibility in society (Razavi 2006). Part and parcel of a fair distribution is a sharing of care responsibilities and actual work between men and women so that both genders become part-time care and part-time wage ­workers. Linking this transformatory perspective with an emancipatory perspective regarding the gender-hierarchical division of labour, any redistribution should entail a defeminization of care work. While ecofeminists like Carolyn Merchant stress and celebrate the ‘mothering’ of life and earth as feminine power, other feminists reject this stereotyping of gender roles and the reassertion of women’s role in non-monetarized and informal economies. Sherilyn MacGregor (2010) suggests a politicization of care, including care for the en-

wichterich  |   87 vironment and nature, framed in a citizenship approach that  aims at fair distribution of care within each society. She warns  that any essentializing of feminine capacities and identities runs a high risk of being instrumentalized in the context of neoliberal policies of privatization and downsizing of public spending, provisions and institutions. Complementary to a fair and gender-just distribution of care work, a rights- and redistribution-based public service system has to be set up, which provides universal social security and is not subjected to the imperative of efficiency and profit, and to the casino logic of derivatives and hedge funds. When care work is integrated into the market as waged service provision, it is subjected to efficiency standards (e.g. time modules for the care for the elderly) and the imperative of cost reduction for profit maximization. This paradoxical integration through flexibilization and precarization of employment shows as much as the long-standing controversial debate among feminists about wages for housework that internalization is no solution to the principle of othering. A monetarization of unpaid care work following time-use studies would reinforce the principles of the Homo oeconomicus and of the cash economy (Bidegain and Nayar 2013: 39). As there is only a little scope to increase the productivity and effi­ ciency of care work (feeding of babies has its own rhythm and speed) the market will always extend low appreciation and low payment for this kind of work (Madörin 2013). It is politics which has to challenge market rules and define non-market-based criteria for recognition of care, e.g. a value for social reproduction or regeneration of human and non-human nature, a bonus for the public good or solidarity that appreciates how the care, household and subsistence economy co-constructs individual well-being, social cohesion and the wealth of the nations. This thinking out of the box opens up discursive and practical space to expand the care logic against the neoliberalization of social relations and the economization of nature. However, in a neoliberal context, the ambivalences of any voluntary work and community self-help initiatives are obvious: they can be instrumentalized to cushion the dismantling of social welfare and reduce costs for caring and social security by shifting responsibilities from the states to the private sphere and decentralizing welfare and care. The triple-R transition has to be facilitated and framed by political measures that create an enabling environment. Instead of expansion

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of the weekly work time it should be shortened so that part-time employment is available for everybody, men and women. This has to go hand in hand with a revalidation of labour that overcomes the prevailing wage and income gaps, which are based on the gender and ethnic segmentation of the labour market, the feminization and devaluation of care work. Minimum wages and maximum income capped by a tax for the rich could (only) be first steps to counter growing inequalities. This should be accompanied by entitlements to social security and pensions for unpaid care workers. Additionally, discourses on an unconditional basic income for every citizen are taking place in Europe. However, cash transfers, in particular conditional cash transfers, imply a risk of neoliberal co-optation that seeks individual and monetary solutions to problems of social inequalities. All of these ongoing discourses are reflected in struggles on the ground and in social movements. Presently, the majority of labour struggles in Europe are organized in the service and care sector with a tendency towards a feminization of labour struggles. Even at the peak of the crisis, nurses and doctors in hospitals, crèche workers and caretakers in old-age homes, catering staff, garbage collectors and selectors went on strike and not only protested against low wages and unhealthy work conditions but also fought for more recognition of the work they do. They worry that the quality of their work in the health and education sector is torpedoed by the efficiency and profitability standards of the corporate sector, as well as by austerity measures in the public sector. Presently, one core concern of care in Europe is the hyper-­ industrialization of food production from genetic modification to factory farming. The current boom in urban agriculture, guerrilla gardening and slow food is a strategy of reclaiming food production and giving preference to the care logic in terms of care for others, self-care and localization over the commercialization and globalization of food production and processing. Feminists are bringing the perspective of care into the new social movements and linking it to resistance against the economization and financialization of everything. Big demonstrations like the ‘Blockupy’ against the European Bank and the stock exchange in Frankfurt use the five-finger strategy, meaning a big demonstration is split into various marches and rallies in order to stress different topics before they join together in one broad stream of resistance. Usually, one of

wichterich  |   89 the thematic fingers or wings of the rally is the ‘care’ finger, which emphasizes the problems of social reproduction in the real and the financial economy. The protesters contest the boom in investments in old-age homes and speculation in life assurance and the life expectancy of people that put more cost-reduction pressure on care for the sake of a quick return for the investors. In 2013 they demanded a ‘care revolution’.4 Commoning and commons Another intersection of feminist economic and ecological concerns and practices is commons. Commons are socially constructed antipodes to private property and against the overall tendency of privatization and commodification. In capitalist societies prosperity and wealth are defined by private property, appropriation and control of material goods and capital. Private accumulation happens increasingly at the expense of the public good and societal wealth. Additionally, the current neoliberal austerity policies in Europe based on the dismantling of social welfare and the distributive state impoverish the public, shrink the public sector and increase social disparities. If public goods and services are privatized or financialized, capital owners and the rules of the market decide about the common good and the enforcement of human rights (Bollier and Helffrich 2012). This boosts economic and financial governance vis-à-vis democratic decision-making regarding the public good. Against the background of privatization and financialization of natural resources and public services, a whole movement emerged around material and immaterial commons, from the common heritage of mankind such as the oceans and the atmosphere to the fishes in a village pond, from knowledge creation and culture to digital software. This is in line with Elinor Ostrom’s findings about the advantages of community-driven, collective and polycentric self-governance of common-pool resources over market- and state-controlled resource use (Ostrom 2010). It contests Garrett Hardin’s assumption of the tragedy of the commons – that they will be inevitably overused and finally destroyed. The recent focus on commons is closely linked to the demand for ‘real’ and ‘direct’ democracy, which popped up as a response to the crisis in southern European countries. Peter Linebaugh’s (2008) saying ‘There is no commons without commoning’ stresses the process of

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bottom-up and participatory democracy in the definition and administration of commons from forests to care for kids, from health facilities to digital software, from food sovereignty to public transport, from participatory to gender-sensitive budgets. Commoning as a process of negotiation generates new social contracts with rights, duties and rules on how to define, care and share common resources in a fair and democratic manner. Commoning is a way to protect commons and public goods from privatization, commercialization and speculation if it is accompanied by a strong regulatory regime that governs and finally stops the commodification of living organisms and public goods, patenting of biodiversity and genes, as well as speculation on harvests and ecosystem services. Critical economic demands intersect with ecological demands with regard to global public goods such as the atmosphere and oceans: their usage and pollution have to be regulated and taxed by a global governance regime and transnational financial transactions have to be taxed and regulated in order to avoid financialization and speculation. Commons break with the logic of private property as the root cause of individual greed for prosperity, accumulation and material wealth. Collective property opens up space for economic activity in solidarity and redistributive justice. However, communities that are constructed in the process of commoning must not be imagined as homogeneous and power-balanced entities. Commons and an ‘economia solidaria’ neither automatically harmonize the interests within a community nor balance power relations, nor do they change gender stereotypes and the gender-hierarchical division of labour and decision-making. Apparently it is usual that men engage in IT commons, free software and 3D printers while women prefer gardening and cooking. Therefore, commoning as a democratic process of constructing communities as political subjects has to address internal power relations and asymmetries head-on while respecting and negotiating different interests and identities. Along with the construction of commons and setting a governance regime, those political subjects have to be fully aware of the risk of being co-opted by neoliberal politics, by decentralization and inclusion in value chains of the green economy. The discourses about commons are corresponding with struggles and movements such as ‘transition towns’ and the ‘right to the city’.5 In the wake of privatization, gentrification and financialization of urban spaces and public goods, city dwellers claim and occupy public

wichterich  |   91 spaces. Citizens’ initiatives organize opening hours of public libraries, museums and swimming pools when a broke city administration plans to close them down. The modernization of infrastructure and transport systems that marginalize and destroy public spaces and  disregard public health as a common are highly controversial and contested. When airports are enlarged and air traffic is intensified during nighttime – legitimized as a necessary precondition for global competition in trade and transport – people fight against environmental degradation and noise pollution, and for their common right to rest and sleep. In the German city of Stuttgart people – like Indian women in the Chipko movement – embraced old trees in a public park that were earmarked for felling for the enlargement of the railway station in the middle of the city. Those protesters were no longer willing to sacrifice well-being and health to economic growth. In Istanbul, the defence of a public park in the centre of the city against the plans of the government to erect a big building – a shopping mall with a mosque – was actually the departure point for a whole democratization movement. Protests against new techno-science-based resource extractivism that destroys commons supposedly for the sake of common energy provision are widespread across eastern and western Europe (Feod­ oroff et al. 2013). They defend the local natural environment and the right to democratic decision-making about local livelihoods and commons against the logic of growth. Sufficiency and the culture of enough The revival of the de-growth debate can draw on a long-standing critique of resource- and energy-intensive globalization that does not sustain its living foundations, the critique of reckless trade and investment policies, of a race to the bottom and aggressive competition for resources. In the 1990s, feminist political ecologists had facilitated to a large extent the critique of Western overproduction and over-consumption in opposition to the discourse on ‘overpopulation’ as the main root cause of environmental degradation (Charkiewicz et al. 2001). The two-pronged perspective on reduction and sufficiency is directed towards structural transformation of production and consumption relations and coupled with a bottom-up participatory approach in order to change behavioural and mental patterns. An important driver for de-growth and for the principle of enough

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and sufficiency is a refusal to further externalize social and ecological costs, and the risks and damage caused by global production and consumption to the global South, to nature and to the weakest sections of societies (Muraca 2013). The global South has been used as resource base and sink for the imperialistic way of life of the global consumer classes and the North (Brand and Wissen 2012). The neoliberal and neocolonial ‘social contract’ on mass consumption (Silver 2003: 153) that legitimized stagnation or reduction of real wages in the North through the import of cheap consumer goods based on the exploitation of human and natural resources in the global South has been part and parcel of this imperialistic lifestyle. To some extent, workers and weak sections of European societies have been included in this unfair pact. Feminist economists have subjected this offshoring and outsourcing of production to a myriad of critiques. From a feminist perspective the care economy, provision for basic needs, public services, social security as well as environmental protection and natural regeneration – sectors that presently shrink – have to grow. At the same time, the obsessive industrial drive towards expansion and growth has to be reversed, resource-, energy- and emission-intensive superfluous production in the North – e.g. in the automotive and the arms industry – has to be downsized and converted into resource-sparing and recycling industries (AWID 2012/2013; Bidegain and Nayar 2013). Additionally, ‘caring states’ that put people’s needs and rights before competitiveness and the neoliberal shift of responsibilities would regulate and decelerate trade and investment liberalization, the global race for raw materials, land and water grabbing, and financialization of resources. More space is needed for local and regional economic cycles in order to shrink the export dependency of the economy. The twin strategy is a reduction in the through-put of natural resources and of CO2 emissions on the one hand, and on the other the enforcement of global social rights and fair distribution in order to achieve more social and environmental justice and to finally change the society–nature relations. Measurement of what is enough has to be defined anew and is subject to democratic negotiations about growth and shrinking of the economy. Not producing at the expense of others and of nature-loss is the decisive criterion for sufficiency, the Buddhist wisdom of knowing what is enough. ‘Real’ democracy requires as well a state that creates enabling spaces for an economy of solidarity and for low-carbon self-administered

wichterich  |   93 resource-preserving and resource-recycling initiatives. Everywhere in Europe at the grassroots level, alternative projects, livelihoods and place-based practices are being revitalized and reinvented and are mushrooming in order to explore a ‘good life’ and ‘happiness’ that are more self-defined and independent of the corporate value chains, fossil-based production and global consumption norms. Those initiatives set up new ways of social reproduction and commoning at the margins of the capitalist market economy: organic farming and slow-food initiatives, for-free shops and free book cupboards in public parks, cooperative housing, user cooperatives, a share economy and local currencies are spreading. Many of these initiatives in southern Europe are – sometimes desperate – responses to the crisis. However, they are also a kind of practical critique of the corporate-driven careless and reckless globalization, and reclaim local livelihoods, regional circles of cooperation and resource justice6 (Social Movement Studies 2011; Azzellini and Sitrin 2014; Kagan 2012). Particularly in the area of food and energy supply many people are searching for ways to delink from the corporate monopolized sector, and embark on gaining partial food and energy sovereignty. Amid an endless series of food scandals and cruelty against animals, veganism and animal protection have been chosen in particular by youth to counter industrialization, commercialization and the throw-away atti­ tude of the consumerist society. In order to reduce food losses and waste in Europe, which are estimated at 90 tonnes per year and at 100 kilograms per person,7 young people are building networks in cities to save food products by ‘containering’ (removing them from waste containers), redistributing and using them instead of destroying those that have passed their expiry date. Initiatives of urban agriculture, guerrilla gardening, intercultural gardens, shared garden spots, roof and balcony gardening and food co-ops are mushrooming. On the way to a low-carbon society, community-based, decentralized, selfadministrated systems of ‘energy democracy’ are on the increase. In order to oppose energy monopolies, local communities are taking new technologies based on renewable energies, solar energy or windmills into their own hands.8 Conclusions: connecting care, commons and enough Both feminist political ecology and feminist political economics engaged in the recent past in the discourses on care, commons and

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sufficiency in production and consumption. After years of working in parallel, the multiple crises increased the urgency to link up diverse feminist discourses and practices (AWID 2012/2013; Bidegain and Nayar 2013). Care, commons and a culture of enough can be seen as strategic sites for transformation and cornerstones of another development paradigm, which countervails the concepts of green economy, a green new deal and the hegemonic logic of unfettered growth in economic structures, human–nature relations and simultaneously in people’s mindsets. They withdraw energies and capacities from the capitalist logic, and aim at turning away from the ideology of ‘more’ through consumption and private ownership of material goods. Challenging the GDP growth perspective, its destructive potentials vis-à-vis human and non-human nature and the ecosystems, and its multiple social and environmental injustices from the level of livelihoods and sustaining life, feminist political ecology and feminist political economics could re-embed the economy in social relations and caring relations for nature. Claiming a ‘caring economy’ aims at redirecting the whole economy at well-being and social cohesion, human and social growth, sustainable resource use and society–nature relations without renewed domination and exploitation of the ‘other’, the global South, ‘cheap’ labour and nature. Claiming a ‘caring state’ does not mean asking for a revival of the European welfare state that created prosperity through the neocolonial exploitation of untapped human and natural resources in the South and by appropriation of women’s unpaid care work within the male breadwinner model. But a state is needed that breaks away from the neoliberal focus on maximizing competitiveness and reducing social and environmental costs. It must shift its focus to fair distribution through regulation and taxation of real and financial markets, and protection of nature, social reproduction and the public good from subjection to economization and privatization – thereby enabling spaces for an economy of solidarity, a change in society–nature relations and for overcoming the production–reproduction divide and the gender-hierarchical division of labour. Still, feminist discourses as well as people’s struggles for resources, rights and recognition are fragmented and distinct. They have to build solidarity grounded in common interests across differences in order to gain strength against neoliberal political attempts and green economy strategies to co-opt care, decentralized and community-organized

wichterich  |   95 initiatives. This systemic co-optation and inclusive liberalism could be the new tragedy of the commons and of commoning. This is why feminist political economists and feminist political ecologists have to link up and build strong alliances if they want to make happen the many small transitions and transformations that could – step-by-step – allow the economy to abandon the profit drive and find its caring feet.

Notes 1  See www.nationalcapitaldeclara­ tion.org. 2  See www.carbontradewatch.org; www.no-redd.com; www.redd-monitor. org. 3  See www.womenscarbonstandard. org. 4  See care-revolution.site36.net/ Seeving k: öll-Stiftung,Andrea/. 5  See www.transitiontowntotnes. org; www.righttothecity.org. 6  See www.tweetsandthestreets.org. 7  See www.unric.org/en/food-waste. 8  See www.renewablec­ommunities. org/p/energy-democracy.html; clean technica.com/2013/05/14/energydemocracy-video-campaign/.

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98   |  two how quickly you can deliver care’, Interview, FES, Berlin, www.fes.de/ gender/infobrief/focus/. Madörin, M., B. Schnegg and N. Bagh­ dadi (2012) ‘Advanced economy, welfare state and traditional care regimes’, in S. Razavi and S. Staab (eds), Global Variations in the Political and Social Economy of Care. Worlds Apart, New York: UNRISD, pp. 43–61. Martinez-Alier, J., U. Pascual, F.-D. Vivien and E. Zaccai (2010) ‘Sustainable de-growth: mapping the context, criticisms and future prospects of an emergent paradigm’, Ecological Economics, 69: 1741–7. Mayer, M. (2009) ‘The “right to the city” in the context of shifting mottos of urban social movements’, City, 13(2/3): 262–74. McAfee, K. (1999) ‘Selling nature to save it? Biodiversity and the rise of green developmentalism’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 17(2): 133–54. — (2011) ‘Nature in the market-world: social and development con­ sequences and alternatives’, www. unrisd.org/80256B42004CCC77/(htt pInfoFiles)/3F9726366CFA71A6C125 79210032B07B. Mellor, M. (2009) ‘Ecofeminist political economy and the politics of money’, in A. Salleh (ed.), Eco-Sufficiency and Global Justice, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 251–68. Mies, M. (1986) Patriarchy and Accumula­ tion on a World Scale. Women in the International Division of Labour, London: Zed Books. Mies, M. and V. Shiva (1993) Ecofeminism, Halifax, London and New Jersey: Fernwood Publications/Zed Books. Mohanty, C. T. (1984) ‘Under Western eyes: feminist scholarship and col­ onial discourses’, Boundary 2, 12(3): 333–58. Muraca, B. (2012) ‘Towards a fair

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wichterich  |   99 context. Conceptual issues, research questions and policy options’, ­Geneva: UNRISD. Rocheleau, D. (2008) ‘Political ecology in the key of policy: from chains of explanation to webs of relation’, Geoforum, 39: 716–27. Rocheleau, D., B. Thomas-Slayter and E. Wangari (1996) Feminist Political Ecology: Global Issues and Local Experiences, London: Routledge. Royal Tropical Institute et al. (2012) Challenging Chains to Change. Gender equity in agricultural value chain development, Amsterdam: KIT. Sachs, W. (ed.) (1992) The Development Dictionary. A Guide to Knowledge as Power, London: Zed Books. Salleh, A. (2009) ‘From eco-sufficiency to global justice’, in A. Salleh (ed.), EcoSufficiency and Global Justice, London and New York: Pluto, pp. 291–313. Sassen, S. (1998) ‘Towards a feminist analytics of the global economy’, in S. Sassen, Globalization and Its Dis­ contents. Essays on the new mobility of people and money, New York: New Press, pp. 81–107. Schalatek, L. (2009) Gender and Climate Finance: Double Mainstreaming for Sustainable Development, Washing­ ton, DC: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung. Schneider, F., G. Kallis and J. MartinezAlier (2010) ‘Crisis or opportunity? Economic degrowth for social equity and ecological sustainability’, Intro­ duction, Journal of Cleaner Produc­ tion, 18: 511–18. Seguino, S. (2000) ‘Gender in­ equality and economic growth: a cross-­country analysis’, in World Development, 28(7): 1211–30. Silver, B. (2003) Forces of Labour, Cam­ bridge: CUP. Social Movement Studies (2011) Journal on Social, Cultural and Political ­Protest, 11(3/4), special Occupy! issue.

Stern, N. (2006) Report on the Economics of Climate Change, webarchive. nationalarchives.gov.uk. Tandon, N. (2010) ‘New agribusiness investments mean wholesale sell-out for women farmers’, Gender & Devel­ opment, 8(3): 503–15. — (2012a) ‘Empowerment of women in a green economy in the context of sustainable development and pov­ erty eradication’, UN Women Paper for Rio+20 and the Green Economy, Toronto: UN Women. — (2012b) ‘First casualties of the green economy – risks and losses for low income women’, Development, 55(3): 311–20. — (2013) ‘Harmonising our footprints: reducing the ecological while accumulating the care’, in genanet (ed.), Sustainable Economy and Green Growth: Who Cares?, International Workshop Linking Care, Livelihood and Sustainable Economy, pp. 22–6, www.genanet.de/fileadmin/ downloads/Green_Economy/work shop_care-eco_web.pdf. . Terry, G. (2009) Climate Change and Gender Justice, Oxford: OUP. UNEP (2009) The Global Green New Deal, www.unep.org/pdf/A_Global_ Green_New_Deal_Policy_Brief.pdf. — (2011) Towards a Green Economy. Pathways to Sustainable Development and Poverty Eradication, www.unep. org/greeneconomy. Unmüssig, B., W. Sachs and T. Fatheuer (2012) Critique of the Green Economy. Toward social and environmental equity, Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, www. boell.de/downloads/Critique_of_the_ Green_Economy.pdf. UNRISD (2012) ‘Social dimensions of green economy’, Research and Policy Brief 12, Geneva: UNRISD. Waldby, C. and M. Cooper (2010) ‘From reproductive work to regenerative labour. The female body and the

100   |  two stem cell industries’, Feminist Theory, 11(1): 3–22. Welzer, H. (2011) Mental Infrastructures. How growth entered the world and our souls, Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, www.boell.de/downloads/Ecology14-Mental-Infrastructures.pdf. Wichterich, C. (2009) ‘Women peasants, food security and biodiversity in the crisis of neoliberalism’, Development Dialogue, 51: 133–42. — (2011) ‘Downloading risks and costs: a feminist perspective on the global multiple crisis’, in E. A. Tonak (ed.), Critical Perspectives on the World Bank and the IMF, Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi Universitesi Yayinlari, pp. 115–27. — (2012) ‘The future we want’, HeinrichBöll-Stiftung, www.boell.de/

publications/publications-the-futurewe-want-publication-14180.html. Women’s Carbon (2013) ‘The women’s carbon standard’, www.womens carbon.org/home. World Bank (2006) Gender and Equality as Smart Economics, Action Plan 2007–2011, Washington, DC: World Bank. — (2011a) ‘Inclusive green growth: the pathway to sustainable develop­ ment’, Washington, DC: World Bank. — (2011b) World Development Report 2012. Gender equality and develop­ ment, Washington, DC: World Bank. Yeates, N. (2009) Globalizing Care Economic and Migrant Workers. Explorations in Global Care Chains, London: Routlege.

3 | LIFE, NATURE AND GENDER OTHERWISE: FEMINIST REFLECTIONS AND PROVOCATIONS FROM THE ANDES

Catherine Walsh

Genderized ideologies … are infused with the fabric of social life, they penetrate our human experience, and extend to our perceptions of the natural world, the social order, and the structures of prestige and power. (Silverblatt 1990; translation by Catherine Walsh)

Openings In the Andes, as in much of the continent that native peoples call Abya Yala – land in full maturity – life, nature and gender are historically intertwined. This intertwine is a component part of Andean cosmology. However, and as Silverblatt’s words suggest, it is also constitutive of the social structures of power, most especially those that order the modern/colonial project. This chapter is not interested in studying about Andean cosmology, advancing a framework of ontological or ecological relation, or making modernity/coloniality an object of inquiry and investigation. Rather, its interest and concern are thinking with and reflecting/ provoking from the ‘otherwise’. That is the living thought and living relation of nature and gender which defy modernity’s dichotomous binaries, fracture its universal claims, and make possible decolonial cracks and an outside-otherwise.1 Here, my own positioning and enunciated place are important. In my immigration from the United States to Ecuador more than twenty years ago, I assumed the political-epistemic-existential and praxistical challenge of thinking from and with this place of South. I do not see myself as an observer-researcher-tourist. Rather, I position myself as an engaged intellectual activist; indeed, a militant, or what some might refer to as a ‘public’ intellectual. This is a position moulded by my experience of accompanying and collaborating with collectives, communities and social movements at their request. It is

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marked by my pedagogical imperatives of intervention, action and transformation. Similarly, while I am a feminist, I do not typically, and for a number of reasons, name feminism as my project. Yet as I am beginning to (re)think with those who do, and, most especially, with women, men and dual-spirited beings thinking and articulating the relation of decoloniality, feminisms, gender and sexuality, I feel I am open to exploring new intersections, connections and conversations of the ‘otherwise’, of ‘living relation’. This chapter is an endeavour to continue to open my work to these conversations. The chapter is organized in three parts. The first considers nature and gender with relation to the modern/colonial/imperial matrices of power. It examines how the interrelated Western projects of civilization, Christianity, scientific exploration and binary-based thought interrupted the lived arrangements of interrelation. And it explores the significance and practice of the interrelation. The second part highlights some of the transcendental shifts and transformative horizons in the Andes today and the accompanying challenges and contradictions. The third and final part comes back to the ‘otherwise’ and some of its concrete manifestations, bringing to the fore new relationalities, pluriversals and processes of interculturalization and interversalization. Nature, gender and the modern/colonial/imperial matrices of power In contrast to colonization – typically understood as the imposed practices of political power surpassed by ‘independence’ – ‘coloniality’ is a model or matrix of domination and power that is ongoing, systematic and in continual construction. It is inseparable, as Aníbal Quijano (2000), who first coined the term several decades ago, has argued, from modernity and the capitalist system of power that began with the colonization of the Americas, and the related classificatory processes of race and racialization. While coloniality of power is understood as the overriding concept-analytic, the coloniality of knowledge, of being, of gender and of nature have oriented the work of a growing number of scholars and intellectual-activists in the Americas and more recently in other regions of the world. Coloniality’s significance is not in, nor is it simply a product of, academia. It is not an abstract universal or a new theoretical paradigm, although it is sometimes presented as such. Instead, it marks a past-present reality that people who have lived the colonial difference know well, regardless of the ways they may

walsh  |   103 choose to name it. Moreover, it calls forth the multiple strategies of resistance, opposition and insurgent action – in body and mind – that enable and construct decolonial horizons. In the South American Andes, I have come to see the ways that coloniality as a matrix of power acts not just on knowledge, being, gender and nature, but on their complex intersections and en­twining, an entwining that is at the very base of Andean cosmology and social struggle, one that without a doubt extends to the cosmologies and life-visions of ancestral peoples elsewhere. I have also come to recognize that the power of coloniality has never taken total hold. In this context, and given the strong ties that ancestral communities maintain with Pachamama or Mother Earth, it seems relevant to examine and consider the operation of this coloniality of intersection, what I have referred to elsewhere as the coloniality of Mother Nature or Mother Earth, or the coloniality of Nature with a capital ‘N’, which in essence is the coloniality of life/existence. For me, this perspective finds root and ground in the inter­related projects of civilization, scientific exploration, Christianity and evangel­ ization, gendering, development (understood as modernization and ‘progress’) and education. It is a pattern of power that works at the intersection of the cultural, ontological, existential, epistemic, territorial, cosmological and socio-spiritual, imposing a notion of a singular world governed by the central dichotomous binary of humans (read: white European/European-descended, lettered, heterosexual men) over Nature. This binary interrupted the historical, ancestral, material and cosmological interrelation of peoples, animals, plants and land, and among the dead and living, and justified man’s intervention in and  control, domination and appropriation of Nature since the socalled Conquest. Nature, of which humans – living and dead – are a part and the cosmos together configured, reproduced and ordered life, and with it modes of gender grounded in the practical everyday activity of women and men, and in the fluidity between feminine and masculine forces, forces that superseded the anatomical body. Colonial-imperial domination from the Incas to the Spanish and beyond worked to undo the fluidity and ties. At the same time, it worked to instal hierarchies, dichotomies and division based on the ‘ideas’ of race, gender, sexuality and nature and on the social systems of hetero-normativity, patriarchy

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and racialization. The control, domination, exploitation and taming of the uncivilized, savage, irrational and wild, i.e. nature, ‘Indios’, ‘blacks’ and women (and most especially indigenous and African women), thus became ‘naturalized’ mechanisms and necessities of the modern/colonial order. Moreover, the civilizing and ordering of the savage and wild, and the incorporation of this natural world into the world of European science, property and possession, were constitutive elements of the dissemination of power. The natural/scientific explorations first led by Condamine, Linnaeus and Humboldt, and locally carried out by ‘New World’ criollo elite such as José Celestino Mutis and Francisco José de Caldas in Nueva Granada, objectified and naturalized nature. By exploring, explaining, classifying and ordering the natural world, these men – whether intentionally or not – imposed a cultural order and control, constitutive of what Mary Louise Pratt has referred to as a ‘European planetary consciousness’ – that is, ‘an orientation toward interior exploration and the construction of global-scale meaning through the descriptive apparatus of natural history, … a basic element constructing modern Eurocentrism’ (Pratt 1992: 15). This ‘planetary consciousness’ is of course a component part of what we understand today as the universalizing project of Western civilization, the hegemony which Andean Abya-Yalean insurgent processes endeavour to upset and overturn. It is also fundamental to the belief, vital then and now, that the control, exploitation and use of nature as natural resources, commodities and environment are a human necessity and right. ‘The desire to dominate Nature, to change it into exportable products, has always been present in this region,’ says Alberto Acosta, the former president of Ecuador’s Constitutional Assembly. ‘In the early stages of Independence, when faced with the earthquake in Caracas of 1812, Simon Bolivar said the famous words, which marked that time, “If Nature objects, we shall fight against it and make it obey us”’ (Acosta 2011). Of course, the desire, right and conceived need to dominate, control and appropriate Nature are constitutive of Western rationality, science and the modern/colonial order – or nomos – of the globe as Earth. In his now classic text The Nomos of the Earth, Carl Schmitt afforded a schema for describing the ways the Earth has been appropriated, divided and cultivated in all the ages of mankind, and the spatial divisions and orders that accompanied the coexistence of peoples,

walsh  |   105 empires and countries. Schmitt’s three nomos are both demonstrative of and essential to the dichotomous divide; ‘Earth’ for him was the ‘planet on which we live, as a whole, as globe’, an essentially modern view and construct. For Schmitt Earth is essentially anthropocentric – that is, given meaning and order by man. The struggle, then, so it seems, is, at least in part, with and against Nature, conceived as barbarism, chaos, conflict and non-order, a struggle considered from the context of the spatial and terrestrial as human realms, where order, orientation and law coincide. It could be argued that because Schmitt’s concern was with the emergence of a global linear thinking that began in 1492 with the start of the ‘modern age’, it was necessarily (hu)man-centric. We do not know whether he thought – or what he thought about – outside this frame. We do not know whether he in any way perceived the operation or even the possibility of other logics for understanding, orienting and being in and with Nature as the totality and relationality inherent to life itself, nor whether the terrestrial as human-Earth was only one component of a much more plural cosmos. Of course, the problem is not with Schmitt himself, but with the analyses proffered by Western thought, including those analyses posited as ‘critical’ that most often obscure the matrix of ongoing colonial power, or – even when mentioning it – simply attribute it to a problem of Eurocentric geopolitics. Left out of the picture is the way coloniality has worked at what many indigenous, African and Africandescended women and men, philosophies and life-visions perceive as the complex intersection of the cultural, ontological, existen­tial, epistemic, territorial, cosmological and ancestral-socio-spiritual lifespheres – that is, at what can be understood as Mother Earth, or as Nature with a capital ‘N’. In a practical sense, the coloniality of Nature has worked to reify a singular paradigm of Nature and Life as civilization that simultaneously constructs, justifies and serves the global order and its central fundaments: Western modernity, coloniality, patriarchy, hetero-normativity and capitalism all interwoven. Gender – or the modern ‘idea’ of gender as a dichotomous binary distinction – was an essential and significant instrument for solidifying this order and its fundaments, and in rupturing the intimate ties of humans and/ as Nature. Together both binaries interrupted the historical, ancestral, material

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and cosmological interrelation of peoples, animals, plants and land, and of the dead and living. In so doing, they justified man’s intervention in and control, domination and appropriation of nature, as well as, and in a related sense, man’s control, domination and subalternization of women and of the feminine understood and positioned as closer to and constitutive of nature. They also worked to negate, obfuscate and eliminate what Sylvia Marcos calls the duality of fluid polarities that permeates cosmology, life, gender and Eros in Mesoamerica as well as in the Andes. Man and woman, death and life, evil and good, above and below, far and close, light and dark, cold and hot were some of the dual aspects of one same reality. Not mutually exclusive, not static, not hierarchically organized (at least not in the modern pyramidal way), all elements and natural phenomena were construed as a balance of dual valences. If the divine pair [the dual female and male unit] was the ultimate duality in the cosmic realm, its most pervasive expression in the intermediary human domain was gender. (Marcos 2006: 14)

(En)genderings and naturings Gender constructions in both Mesoamerica and the Andes were understood as dynamic, fluid, open and non-hierarchical. They were not based on anatomical distinctions but rather associated with performance, with what people do, and their ways of being in the world, ways that were not fixed but in constant movement, shift, modification and fluid equilibrium (ibid.; Silverblatt 1990). Gender duality implied an interpenetration of the masculine and feminine, the existence of entities (real and supernatural) that incorporated female and male characteristics; nuances of combinations and of a continuum that easily moved between poles.2 The feminine-masculine, in fact, was, in Mesoamerican, Andean and African ancestral cosmologies and traditions, a signifier of wisdom and spiritual power, a fundamental component and metaphor of thought, the cosmos and universe, and of the individual body.3 The originary androgynous whole, understood as the source of creation, exemplified the symmetrical balance between the masculine and feminine and its ritually negotiated tensions.4 The power and privilege of this androgynous creative force was, as Michael Horswell

walsh  |   107 argues, embodied in the Andes by third-gender subjects – quariwarmi (men-women) shamans – whose performative role did not fit neatly into a male or female designation, but instead negotiated between the masculine and feminine, the present and the past, the living and the dead (Horswell 2005: 2). Complementarity, in this sense, was less about a forged union or harmony between the sexes, and more about the conflictive and creative tensions that construct interdependence, mediate power and autonomy, and negotiate gender difference as ‘an invocation of an androgynous whole’ in which the culturally specific role and force of the feminine – including the female’s divine relationship with nature/earth/female deities – played a particularly important role (ibid.: 19, 23). ‘Without an appreciation of the symbolic, performative role of the feminine and the androgyne,’ says Horswell, ‘we cannot fully understand the complexities of Andean gender culture and the negotiation of complementarity in ritual and quotidian contexts.’5 This extends to sexuality as well. As Rita Segato points out, among pre-Colombian Incan societies, indigenous peoples throughout the Americas and Afro-American religious groups, transgender practices were prevalent, including ‘marriages between persons that the West considers of the same sex, and other gender transitivities blocked by the absolute gender system of colonial/modernity’ (Segato forthcoming). Furthermore, and following Silverblatt, it was through the ideology of gender complementarity that nature’s order and work were most often interpreted and understood. Independent masculine and feminine forces were also ancestorheroes and ancestor-heroines of the mortals whose gender they shared. By constructing the supernatural with known materials, Andean women perceived kinship and succession as following the lineage of women and in a parallel sense, men saw themselves as descendants of male lines. (Silverblatt 1990)

If gender complementarity was the fundamental basis for human interaction, cultural reproduction and nature’s order in the Andes, it is no surprise that it also became an essential tool of domination. Such was true not only of the Spanish but also for the Incas, who used the Andean gender scheme as a central strategy of imperial conquest. As Silverblatt explains, the Incas used the ideology of gender to design and forge ties that would bind the conquered to them, ties that, with time, would also begin to mark asymmetries of class and gender.

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As political relations came to replace the relations of kinship, gender was converted into the trope through which power was expressed and articulated. Now more than a metaphor, the emergent imperial institutions fused the control exercised over women with the control over humanity; gender became the form through which class relations were actualized. The formation of classes transformed gender distinctions into gender hierarchies. (Ibid.)

As Silverblatt (ibid.: xxiv) goes on to say, in this way, ‘the construction of the empire altered the material conditions of life of the once autonomous Andean peoples in the same way that it transformed the material conditions of life of women and of men. The control of one part of humanity over the other had a close relation with the privileges of one sex over the other. By exacerbating the differences between the sexes, class formation left in its wake the hierarchy of gender’. Among feminists today, debate exists over whether gender as hier­ archy, and with it patriarchy, is a colonial endeavour, or in fact has much longer and more complex roots going back well before the so-called conquest. The Bolivian Aymara communitarian feminist Julieta Paredes speaks of a patriarchal ‘entronque’ – a link, relationship or junction – between pre-colonial and Western patriarchies. Decolonizing gender means recognizing that gender oppression did not only begin with the Spanish colonizers, but that it also had its own version in precolonial societies and cultures. When the Spanish arrived both visions came together, to the misfortune of we women that inhabit Bolivia. This is the patriarchal entroque or junction. (Paredes 2012: 66)

Similarly, Segato argues – based on her work with indigenous women in Brazil and elsewhere in Abya Yala – that it is possible to define two patriarchal moments: ‘a patriarchy of low impact proper to the world of the community or village’ and ‘the perverse patriarchy of colonial/modernity’ with its imposition of a Western logic and order, including with relation to sexuality, the body, gender relations and genderized violence. Contrary to what other authors also critical of coloniality have affirmed (Lugones and Oyewumi, among others), it seems to me that gender existed in pre-colonial societies, but in a form different

walsh  |   109 from that of modernity. … When this colonial modernity begins to approximate the gender of the community, it dangerously modifies it, intervening in the structures of relations, capturing and reorganizing these relations within while maintaining the semblance of continuity but transforming the sense and meaning of gender and of gender relations. (Segato forthcoming: 19)

Such perspectives are helpful in complicating notions of gender and patriarchy, and in illuminating colonial difference as not necessarily the beginning of hierarchical gender and patriarchal relations, but as a historically significant moment and movement promulgated from the outside that radically intervened in the entwined spheres of gender, sexuality, cosmology and nature. Thus while Inca imperialism, for example, evolved from an inside understanding of the Andean universe, Spanish colonization worked from a radically distinct and exteriorized rationality. Colonial/modern patriarchy, constructed on the basis of dual gender categories, figured the feminine as a ‘disturbance of the masculine “order” and a threat to the “borders” that the male Spanish subject patrolled in his performance of gender identity’ (Horswell 2005: 4). Certainly, and as Horswell argues, the Andean same-sex sexuality and third-gender subject threatened these ‘rules’ and put into question the modern patriarchal ‘system’ constructed on the basis of the absolute binaries of gender and of sex. However, they also challenged early Western pre-modern constructions of patriarchy based on a one-sex model. Margaret Greer helps us understand these constructions through her conversation with Thomas Laqueur: From the Greeks through the seventeenth century the predominant model of sex was a one-sex model, not the two-sex model of radical dimorphism, of anatomical and physiological incommensurability between males and females that has prevailed since the eighteenth century. The one-sex model saw women as imperfect males, possessing the same organs, but inside rather than outside the body, due to a lack of heat. There was not even a technical term for the vagina or ovaries until the eighteenth century … The primary authority for this one-sex model over the centuries was Galen ‘who in the second century A.D. developed the most powerful and resilient model of the structural … identity of the male and female reproductive organs, and demonstrated at length

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that women were essentially men in whom a lack of vital heat – of perfection – had resulted in the retention, inside, of structures that in the male are visible without.’ (Laqueur, cited in Greer 2000: 68)

Greer goes on to show, through the biological determinist Juan Huarte de San Juan’s sixteenth-century text Examen de ingenios para las ciencias (Examination of Genius for the Sciences), that the ground and origin of the one-sex model was in and with the perceptions and power given to Nature (note the use of Huarte’s capital ‘N’): … If Nature, having finished making a perfect man, should want to convert him into a woman, it would require no other work than turning the generative instruments within; and if having made a woman, should wish to change her into a man, after pushing outside the uterus and testicles, Nature would have nothing more to do. (Huarte de San Juan, cited in Greer 2000: 68)

Huarte’s ‘scientifically’ misogynistic account of ‘human nature’ related the humoral composition of the body to mental capabilities; he argued, as did many in his time, for a correspondence between gender, physiological composition and intellectual potential. Yet, as Laqueur aptly argues, such arguments had little to do with biology and the body; ‘they are about power, legitimacy, and fatherhood, in principle not resolvable by recourse to the senses’ (Laqueur 1990: 57, cited in Greer 2000: 70). What is evident, then, is that the onesex model, like the two-sex frame, proceeds from a hierarchically valued gender system to a definition of sexual anatomy, a system and definition that not only inferiorize women but also make us subservient to the model and category of human as man, the basis of patriarchy itself. The resistance to and contestation and subversion of this standard of power (exerted over and with regard to gender and nature) defined a kind of feminism of the time,6 the reaction against which of course was made evident in the European continent in the Spanish Inquisition and witch-hunts that began in the late fifteenth century and lasted for more than three hundred years. The emissaries of the Crown and the Church carried these stan­ dards established on the continent to the colonies. The dictates of Crown and Church came together to constitute the civilizatory project and ‘natural law’. As such, the ‘pagan’ adoration of deities – male, female and androgynous – threatened the supremacy of both. Of

walsh  |   111 particular threat in the Andes were the powers attributed to the female deity Pachamama, Mother Earth. Her favouring of women and the communal veneration, cult rituals and sacred relations that women had with her as Nature-Earth were idolatrous practices to be extirpated and condemned on ecclesiastic grounds and, relatedly, on the grounds of patriarchy, gender hierarchy and civilization. Gender, or rather the idea of gender, became an instrument of power, of social classification and identity but also, and even more crucially, of a colonial civilizatory masculinized project predicated on marking the (hu)man and, consequently, of dominating and transforming nature and its manifestations in less than (hu)man inferiors. Only the civilized were human and men or women, the bourgeois man a being of mind and reason, and the bourgeois woman the one who reproduced race and capital, human only in her relation to the white bourgeois man (Lugones 2012: 73). Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans were constructed as animal-like, wild, savage, irrational and pagan beings of nature. In Western eyes, they were perceived as non-gendered. The colonizing mission, then, was to convert them into males and females (in a hetero-normative sense), ‘males became not-human-as-not-men, the human trait, and colonized females became not-human-as-not-women’ (ibid.: 73). The colonial civilizatory project was not about humanization as such since dehumanization was a constitutive component of this mission. Rather it was about transforming the colonized into men and women, subservient to the dichotomous gender distinction, a transformation that Maria Lugones maintains was in nature and not identity, in its repertoire of justifications for abuse, and its process of the active reduction of the colonized ‘other’, the dehumanization that fits them for classification and marks them as not quite human. Here modernity takes shape as a super-hierarchical and uprooting order of violence that worked (and works), as Segato argues, to emasculate indigenous and African men; hyperinflate the role of men within communities as the public intermediaries with the outside world; privatize, nuclearize and depoliticize the domestic sphere; binarize community-based gender dualities, making women supplemental (and subservient) to men; and inoculate a ‘pornographic eye’, an exterior-induced objectifying gaze and an understanding of sexual access as harm, desecration and appropriation (Segato forthcoming). Furthermore, and for Lugones,

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The civilizing transformation justified the colonization of memory and thus of one’s sense of self, intersubjective relations, and relation to the spirit world, to land, and to the very fabric of one’s conception of reality, identity, social, ecological, and cosmological organization. Thus as Christianity became the most powerful instrument in the transformative mission, the normativity that tied gender and civilization became involved in the erasure of com­munity, of ecological practices, knowledges of planting, weaving, and the cosmos, and not only in changing and controlling reproductive and sexual practices. One can begin to appreciate the tie between the colonial introduction of the instrumental concept of nature central to capitalism and the colonial introduction of the modern concept of gender … (Lugones 2012: 74)

In this sense, what Lugones calls the coloniality of gender – an analytic for understanding the system of racialized capitalist gender oppression – intersects with what I have referred to as the coloniality of Nature, of Mother Nature or Mother Earth. The modern colonial gender system, Lugones aptly contends, is not only hierarchical but also racially differentiated; it is racial differentiation that denies human­ ity and thus gender – understood as a human civilized trait – to the colonized (ibid.: 79). As I have argued here, the modern/colonial analytic of gender and race interweaves with, and, most particularly in the Andes, is a constitutive element of the modern/colonial domination of Nature, understood as Pachamama, as life/existence. In this sense, the col­ onially imposed ideas of gender, race, knowledge, spirituality and being interlace with the control of existence, nature, cosmos and life itself. And it is this entwining that has historically worked to contain, dominate and undo the integral confluence and relationality of being, knowing and doing on Earth, with Nature and the cosmos so central to Andean –as well as to Mesoamerican and African – ancestral life practices and visions. Discovering, recovering and reconstructing this confluence and relation are part and parcel of today’s transcendental shifts, epistemic ruptures and transformative horizons. Such processes are understood not as reiterations of the past but as ways to decolonize and re-create the present, enabling other political imaginaries, significations, in­ terpretations and conversations that challenge the civilizatory posture

walsh  |   113 of the West as the only possible vision of and way of being in the world, invoking, evoking, calling forth from the Andes–Amazon–Pacific the ‘Winds of the South’ to which the Pakistani feminist Corinne Kumar once referred (Kumar 1994). Transcendental shifts, transformative horizons and (en)gendering(s) of the otherwise What are the transcendental shifts occurring in the region today, the political-epistemic ruptures they mark, and the transformative horizons that they open? In what ways do these shifts and horizons challenge, transgress and disrupt the colonial matrices of power above described, and the unitary universal of Western civilization? And how do they engender (and gender) an otherwise? Certainly one of the most transcendental shifts is with regard to Nature. The recognition and naming of Nature as the subject of rights in Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution – including Nature’s right to reparation and restoration – interrupts the human-defined subject of law and with it the Western, colonial and Cartesian logic of binary separation. Nature or Pacha Mama, where life is materialized and reproduced, has the right to an integral respect of its existence and the right to the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions, and evolutionary processes. (Art. 71) Nature has the right to its reparation and restoration. (Art. 72)

Here Pachamama or Mother Earth is understood as a living being, with intelligence, sentiments and spirituality, a being of which humans are a part. Nature in this sense is neither an object nor a use-based exploitable good controlled and dominated by humans; it is an integral part of Life itself that cannot be divorced from women and men as humanity or society. Natural resources and the environment are also differentially positioned; ‘persons, communities, and [ancestral] nationalities and peoples have the right to benefit from the environment and natural resources in the frame of buen vivir’, but exploitation cannot put in permanent danger natural systems or permanently alter Nature’s genetic make-up (Art. 74).7 Bolivia’s 2012 Law of Mother Earth also gives Nature subjectivity and agency. Mother Earth is recognized as a collective subject of

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public interest and a living dynamic system made up of the undivided community of all living beings, interconnected, interdependent, complementary and with a common destiny. The law’s objective, stated in its Article 1, is ‘to establish the vision and foundations of integral development in harmony and equilibrium with the Mother Earth, for living well, guaranteeing the continuity of the capacity of regeneration of Mother Earth’s components and systems of life, recuperating and strengthening local and ancestral knowledges, in the framework of the complementarity of rights, obligations, and responsibilities …’8 This law, a much-weakened version of that initially proposed by the social movement and organization network Pacto de Unidad, continues the differential logic initiated by Ecuador, and historically reflected in Andean cosmologies and practices. It also gives centrality to ‘development’ now posed in the policy arena as vivir bien.9 In fact, a rethinking of development with Nature – and as vivir bien or buen vivir – is an important component of both Bolivian and Ecuadorean government initiatives, now termed Plurinational Plans of Living Well. Both public policy plans intend to bring to the fore an ‘other’ logic and life project that challenge many of the tenets of Western civilization and capitalism. Yet, in their conceptualizations and elaborations, neither engenders a total divorce or separation from these tenets; proposed instead is a kind of movement ‘in-between’ that mixes the liberal rubrics of ‘integral development’, humanism and social inclusion with the differential logics engaged by Nature, Mother Earth and vivir bien/buen vivir. While some contend that this is part of a necessary ‘transition’ politics, others, including myself, fear that such in-between posturing will weaken, co-opt and manipulate the very distinction – the otherwise – that ‘living well’ affords to the Western civilizatory logic (Walsh 2010). Ecuador’s Yasuní Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini (ITT) Initiative marked another shift at the public policy level that opened con­ siderations of the possibility of a post-oil era. The initiative, begun in 2008, asked the international community to compensate Ecuador for keeping 850 million barrels of unexploited oil in the ground, avoiding the emission of 407 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, and preserving the Yasuni National Reserve considered by UNESCO and scientists as one of the most biologically diverse in the world.10 As of February 2013, 330 million dollars had been collected towards this initiative with another 224 million projected for 2013, funds slated for the effective

walsh  |   115 conservation of the reserve, and as a resource for the local communities. In its communications within the country and to the world, the Ecuadorean government described the initiative as historic in that it questions the model of life and consumption of contemporary society. ‘It symbolizes an example of the willingness of a country to change the playing rules of energy consumption, … to transition toward a model of sustainability; … it is a wager for life and for the planet.’11 Yet in August 2013 the government changed its tone, announcing the end of the initiative for monetary reasons and the forthcoming exploitation of oil, a necessary evil, the government contends, for eradicating poverty. Despite national and international cries of opposition arguing that oil exploitation in this environmentally protected national park will irreparably damage biodiversity as well as the vital subsistence of indigenous nationalities and peoples residing in the park, two groups of which live in voluntary isolation, the national Congress approved this measure in October 2013. Their argument: that it is in the national interest. In the subsequent government publicity campaign to convince the public, Amazonian people argued the economic benefits for their communities. Another, which has been described as ‘gendered’ and ‘emotive’, shows a woman holding her baby; as the baby is vaccinated a voice-over says that this small wound will protect and improve life, just as the small wound to Yasuní will improve the lives of many. Challenges and contradictions Of course, the end of the Yasuní Initiative is not the first or the only challenge to the ‘otherwise’, nor are the logics otherwise of Nature and of Life opened by the constitutions and constitutional processes in Ecuador and Bolivia constitutionally dependent.12 Their multiple, diverse and dynamic existences are in ancestral cosmologies, epistemologies of thought and community practices.13 However, what constitutional recognition did do is interrupt the Western logic of constitutions and law themselves, while simultaneously proposing a radically distinct logic originating from and with ancestral peoples and valid for all beings. The hope was that such logic would filter into and be assumed by government not just in discursive terms but also in policy and practice, necessitating and engendering, on the one hand, a continuous dialogue with ancestral peoples and leaders and, on the other, a move away from extractivism and the exploitation of Nature and its resources. Such is not the case.

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Today extractivism, or what is more often referred to in the region as neo-extractivism – understood as oil, gold, copper, hydrocarbon and gas mining, agroindustry, etc. – is a central and component part of government politics and policy in the region, including in both Bolivia and Ecuador. It is also the central focus of indigenousled protest and mobilization, and of a new government politic of criminalization. In Ecuador, neo-extractivism was officially ushered in with the passage of a Mining Law in December 2008, three months after the popular approval of the new Constitution. With a previous history of only small-scale and mostly artesian mining, the new law positioned open-sky mega-mining (for gold and copper) as a new, necessary alternative to and eventual replacement for oil, given declining oil reserves which estimates suggest will be depleted in the next twenty years. Within this same logic and in the arguments on behalf of the law, mining is presented as indispensable in the struggle against poverty (an argument central to other South American governments’ mining pursuits, most notably Peru and Argentina), a fundamental pursuit of Correa’s project of ‘Citizen Revolution’ reiterated again after his 2013 re-election for the next four years. Noteworthy is the overlooking and negation of the devastating impact of open-sky mining on water, land, livelihood and peoples, clearly witnessed, for example, in neighbouring Peru. Of course, also overlooked and negated are the tenets and rights of the Constitution itself, including the rights of Nature, territorial rights and the collective rights of indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples, including the autonomy implied in these communities’ rights over their lands and their rights to consultation. While mega-mining is a more recent threat, there is also the ongoing impact of other extractivist pursuits, including oilfield expansion, palm oil cultivation, and the newest: genetically modified agriculture (banned in Arts 15 and 401 of the Constitution). The XI Oil Round announced by the Ecuadorean government in November 2012 is demonstrative. Its goal: to auction off twenty-one new oil blocks in the southern Amazon covering 10 million acres of virgin rainforest, home to seven indigenous national­ ities. In response to this initiative and to the Ecuadorean government’s oilfield auctioning at the North American Prospect Expo held in February 2013 in Houston, Texas, the Achuar leader Jaime Vargas made clear the clash in logics:

walsh  |   117 For us, the indigenous people, the rainforest is life. There we are in touch with everything. But, for the powerful capitalists and materialists it is seen as a business market, a money market, for power and capital. But for us, it is the market of life because we find everything there; our pharmacy, our goods, our education, our science, our knowledge, our force, our creator, are all found in the life of the jungle.14

Since the passage of the 2008 Mining Law, protest and mobilization against extractivist plans and policies have resulted in criminal arrests under the rubric of ‘state sabotage and terrorism’. As of 2012, more than two hundred people, many of them indigenous leaders, had been charged. ‘The fighters for Nature and Life are persecuted as terrorists so that the transnationals can loot natural resources,’ says the former energy minister and president of the Constitutional Assembly Alberto Acosta. ‘… Repressive practices inherited from old politics, oriented to disqualify and punish social movements … The hand of 21st Century neo-extractivism.’15 With the March 2012 signing of an agreement between the Ecua­ dorean government and the Chinese company Ecuacorriente for Project Mirador and Cordillera del Condor, one of five scheduled mega-mining projects for the Ecuadorean Amazon, mega-mining offi­cially took hold.16 President Rafael Correa deemed this signing historic not just for Ecuador but for Latin America as a whole since 52 per cent of the profits will remain in the country. ‘We’ve already lost too much time for development,’ says Correa, ‘those that make us lose time are demagogues, “no to mining, no to oil”, enough of these stupidities! We will not permit the infantile Left, with feathers and ponchos, to destabilize this process of change.’17 ‘La megamineria va porque va’ (mega-mining goes because it goes) (Acosta 2012: 16). In the criticism and attack on the ‘infantile Left’, the women-run NGO Acción Ecológica has been a central target, both for its leftist anti-extractivist activism and, of course, the irrational stance of its members as women.18 For Acosta, neo-extractivism makes evident the ongoing nature of the coloniality of power. If we abide by historical experience and the reality being lived in other latitudes, mega-mining directs us to consider in much more depth the schizophrenia of extractivism within the colonial

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matrix of power. Despite changes with relation to past extractivism, particularly in terms of national interest, what remains and what cannot be covered up is the persistence, the ongoing heritage, of the colonial raigambre or entanglement. Worse yet, this 21st century extractivism is recolonizing. (Acosta 2012: 16)

The massive indigenous-led march against mining and for water and dignity in Ecuador in March 2012, the Bolivian mobilizations that began in autumn 2011 and continued through 2012/13 against the building of a Brazilian-funded highway through Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboro Secure (TIPNIS) (an indigenous territory, nature reserve and national park with significant oil and hydrocarbon reserves),19 and the actions that began in Peru in February 2012 against the gold and copper open-sky mega-mining Project Conga,20 signal the emerging and ongoing struggle in the region for Nature and for Life. This struggle is synthesized in the March 2012 Declaration of CAOI, the Coordinadora of Andean Indigenous Organizations, supporting the marches and mobilizations: ‘To defend water is to defend life. Enough of extractivism, false environmental solutions, and the criminalization of indigenous leaders. For the construction and implementation of buen vivir, the protection of Mother Earth, and authentic plurinational states.’ At its third Congress held in July 2012, CAOI reiterated its opposition to the politics of extractivism being pushed by neoliberal, alternative and progressive states against Nature and/as Mother Earth, politics that seek to divide indigenous organizations, criminalize leaders and criminalize the exercise of rights. Their call at this Congress, and as children of Mother Earth, was for the construction of a new civilizatory paradigm grounded in buen vivir.21 Thus while government policy in the region – in Bolivia and Ecuador, but also in the progressively defined regimes of Argentina and Brazil – increasingly challenges, contradicts and conflicts with the otherwise of Nature and Life, its distinct civilizatory concept and project, and its constitutional projection (in the case of Bolivia and most particularly Ecuador), government and law were never the protagonists of the transcendental shifts, the epistemic ruptures or the transformative horizons. The protagonists are – and historically have been – the ancestral communities of women and men in their continuous struggle to give credence and vitality to the otherwise, and, in so doing, to interrupt and transgress the multiple spheres of power

walsh  |   119 and domination. Included are those spheres promulgated by Western and Westernizing rationalities and modernities as the sole possibility of being and living the ‘good life’, but also those forms, manifestations and practices of power that are not solely attributed to the West and which propagate hierarchical genderized and patriarchal relations. Of relationalities, feminisms and pluri-interversalizations The ‘otherwise’ denotes more than an ‘either/or’. It endeavours to transgress binaries by intervening in and expanding the cracks or fissures, including those of the typically conceived oppositions of the West and the rest, and of modernity and modernization versus cosmology and/as tradition. In so doing, the ‘otherwise’ marks and constructs a different movement and moment simultaneously grounded in constructions and practices of re-existence and re-creation that engender and bring to the fore new relationalities, pluriversals and processes of interculturalization and interversalization. Several examples serve as illustration. On 16 October 2013, approximately a hundred Amazonian women organized under the banner of ‘Women mobilized in defence of life’ arrived in Quito, many with their children, in what they termed a ‘March for Life’, to demand that the crude oil in the Yasuni Park remains in the ground. Among their objectives and motivations: to evidence the ransacking of natural resources through extractivism and within a model of capitalist accumulation, and to socialize and make visible their community-based model of life, ‘Kawsak Sacha’ (the living forest or jungle), a concept integral to the defence of Nature and Sumak Kawsay or buen vivir. In the communiqué circulated before their arrival in the nation’s capital, they asserted: ‘As women we feel from the deepness of our wombs, the threats of extractivism; we consider as urgent the need to open debate in this critical moment generated with regard to Yasuní-ITT and to come out in defence of our nourishing mother (Mother Forest or Mother Nature) that gives birth, raises and protects her children without distinction to ethnicities or social classes.’22 The Amazonian women’s petitions to meet with the president were denied. They thus decided to extend their time in Quito, calling for the national solidarity of women to the cause, and convoking from the Arbolito Park – a central meeting place in the last several decades for indigenous mobilizations – women, youth and the masses to enter

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into dialogue with them and assume this women-led struggle for Life and Nature. By so doing, these women used the urban space as an educational forum, building understandings of their struggles, lifevisions and realities, while at the same time positioning and linking these life-visions and struggles with the broader project of buen vivir as a shared project – and new ‘interversal’ – that endeavours to move beyond capitalist exploitation and accumulation. The fact that they did this as women broke the mould of contemporary male-dominated Amazonian-indigenous politics in which men, more often than not, assume both public and organizational leadership and voice. But it also brought to attention what is increasingly evident throughout the region, and that is the leadership of women in today’s struggles for Nature and Life, for the ‘otherwise’. Such leadership and struggle were also made evident at a meeting I attended in Quito in October 2013 of the Network of Women Defenders of Social and Environmental Rights (Red Latinoameri­ cana de mujeres defensoras de derechos sociales y ambientales). Here the women speakers, indigenous and mestizas, representatives of women’s community-based, environmental and social organizations in Bolivia, Guatemala, Peru and Ecuador, made clear the ways in which extractivism violates life, nature and women. ‘For us extractivism is rape and invasion,’ said Lourdes Huanca from FEMUCARINAP in Peru, a violation that takes place on ‘the territory of our bodies’. Here the reference to rape is not metaphorical. Sexual violence is, in fact, one of the principal characteristics and effects of extractivism in Latin America today, brought on not only by the presence in communities of outsiders tied to extractivist projects and industry, but also by the shifts in community dynamics, relations and structures brought about by this presence, increasing levels of alcoholism and the fostering of machista behaviour and a male-dominated culture. Women are those most affected by extractivism in terms of sexual violence and abuse, but also health, economic, social and familial instability, and territorial displacements. As Huanca also affirmed, there is an additional problem and element at play here, and that is the way community men are today using the Andean ideas of duality and parity as conceptual tools that play into the idea of the superiority of the man – ‘of the power of testicles’, she said – justifying the rape of young girls as ‘natural’. Cosmovision here is distorted to justify men’s exertion of force over female bodies as nature, Huanca affirmed.

walsh  |   121 Huanca’s affirmation recalls that of other Andean women and feminists, most particularly Julieta Paredes, who points out how ‘chachi-warmi’ – the complementary Andean (heterosexual) pair of man-woman – is increasingly called forth by men to sacralize social relations within the community, naturalize daily injustices against women, and demonize feminism as an imposition of the West.23 As Paredes argues, Our indigenous brothers tell us that feminism is only western and that there is no need in our communities for this western thought because we have the complementary practice of chachi-warmi, and that we only need to practice this because machismo arrived with colonization. Chachi-warmi does not recognize the real situation of indigenous women, does not incorporate the gender denunciation in the community; it naturalizes discrimination, inequalities, and the exploitation and oppression of women. Chachi-warmi does not have the instrument of gender denunciation, and we need this in order to understand and reveal the causes of the historic conditions of women’s oppression in our communities in order to change it. (Paredes 2012: 74–5)

For Paredes, the problem is not with the Andean vision of the complementary pair, but instead with its present-day machista and conservative use and interpretation as male-dominated heterosexual partners. As such, she proposes within the frame of community-based feminism a complementary pair of equals, warmi-chachi – that is not simply a change in the order of the words, but a reconceptualization from women, ‘because as women we are the ones subordinated; the building of an equilibrium, a harmony in the community and society, comes from women’ (ibid.: 77). In her arguments for communitarian (or community-based) feminism, Paredes takes feminism out of the purview of the perspectives of the West, not negating Western feminism but rather its hegemonic and universalizing authority. She, along with other women in Abya Yala,24 makes visible ‘feminisms’ as a pluriversal that connects women, cultures, generations, ancestors and anti-patriarchal struggle. Feminism is the struggle and political proposal of life, in any part of the world and in any historical period, of any woman that has rebelled against the patriarchy that oppresses her. This definition

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permits us to recognize ourselves as daughters and granddaughters of rebellious and anti-patriarchal great grandmothers. It also locates us as sisters of other feminists in the world, politically positioning us with regard to hegemonic western feminism. (Ibid.: 70)

Today it is the feminisms of the South, most especially of popular sectors, which in the Andes and Abya Yala, but also elsewhere, are enabling more complex analyses and articulations of gender, race, sexuality, patriarchy and capitalism, and the continual reconfigurations of the modern/colonial matrices of power.25 Increasingly referred to in Ecuador and Bolivia as popular and community-based feminism(s), these organizations and groupings of women define themselves within the long horizon of decolonial struggle. That is as part of the resistances that began more than five hundred years ago and continue today; resistances, mobilizations and insurgent actions, constructions and thought that necessarily move away from capitalism, and towards de-patriarchalization, decolonization, the building of a different relation with nature, and societal transformation for all: women, men and all social sectors (Aguinaga et al. 2011). ‘Women who recognize themselves as feminists and who are resignifying feminism from their contexts, experiences, cultural productions in everyday work and life, where nature, Pachamama, appears as a central category of encounter and also of mobilization’ (ibid.: 78). In conversation with some perspectives of ecofeminism – internationally with those represented by Vandana Shiva and Marie Mies and regionally with those repres­ented by the women-run organization Acción Ecológica – this Andean feminism challenges the idea (present among some ecofeminists and men) that women are closer to nature; nature’s protectors within a feminized (maternal) culture of care. Thus while ‘Pachamama’ and ‘Mother Earth’ are central categories of encounter and mobilization, neither should be reduced ‘to a uterine production or reproduction that serves patriarchy. … Pachamama is not something that can be dominated or manipulated at the service of “development” or consumer­ism, … it is [a] cosmos of which humanity is only a small part.’26 These feminisms are increasingly emerging in response to the lived crises and lived contradictions present in the region, including within the processes of transformation and change, give presence to the pluriversal that is feminism today, a posture and stance that are not limited to or necessarily defined by Western constructions and

walsh  |   123 conceptualizations. Feminism here serves not as an identity marker, or as an essentialism that separates women and men. Instead it is a standpoint of denunciation and relation. It is a standpoint of denunciation of the ‘extractivist mechanism of development that is not only economistic and functional to nature, but also racist, patriarchal, and classist’ (ibid.: 82). And, at the same time, it is a standpoint that calls forth, fosters and reconstructs relation, a relation of the feminine and masculine, of knowledges, wisdoms, beings and the  cosmos, of humanity and Nature. It is a relation that is working to dismantle and disarticulate the matrices of power, their hierarchical binaries, and their modern/colonial rationalities and foundations, and, in so doing, to engender and enable the ‘otherwise’ as a radically distinct relationality of existence, being and becoming. Moments, movements and openings that help conclude In August 2013, more than 1,600 women from fifty countries came together in São Paulo, Brazil, for the ninth International Encounter of the World March of Women – an encounter described by its organizers as a moment of feminist political formation: A feminism, diverse, plural, of the people …, that knows that in ­order to change the world, it is necessary to build a great correlation of forces, and as such, to act in alliance with other social movements also defined as anticapitalist, anticolonial, antipatriarchal, and antiracist. … A feminism that seeks that the alternatives being constructed – what we call socialism, buen vivir or sumak kawsay, or something else – recognize and recuperate feminist proposals and emphasize the contribution that women have given to these alternatives …, feminist alternatives that place at the center the sustainability of life … against the paradigm of patriarchal, capitalist, racist, lesbo-phobic, colonial death.27

This ‘moment’ of feminist movement builds on the struggles, perspectives and constructions of the ‘otherwise’ in the South(s) in order to postulate radically distinct standpoints that make evident the modern/colonial entwining of capitalism, racism and patriarchy, and proffer actions of alliance and relation. Such a political moment – evidenced not only in the march but also in the other examples discussed above – pushes theoretical movement, to recall the thinking of the recently deceased Stuart Hall.

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In so doing, the ‘moment’ transverses and transgresses the hereto­ fore established frames of Western feminism and Western feminist thought, of environmental causes and their disciplines (including political ecology), and of social movement separations (in which feminism has been considered as middle class, and as an identity-view not useful for political-economic struggle). As such, the present and ever-increasing moment and movement afford new and transcendental openings, openings that further entwine Nature, gender and life, and afford possibilities of its otherwise – that is, of the widening of the decolonial fissures or cracks, and the (en)gendering of decolonial horizons. Such has been my intention in this text: to deepen understanding from the Andes, my place of thinking, being and becoming, of the ways past and present that Nature, gender and life are intertwined, of the ways imperial/modern/colonial matrices of power have intervened in these spheres, and of the ways struggle and change in the region are bringing to the fore new learnings, prospects, considerations, conversations and articulations. While capitalism and the remnants of the Western civilizatory model remain present, and the modern/ colonial matrices of power continue their reconfiguration even under left and ‘progressive’ government banners, the moment, movement and openings impelled most particularly by women are indicative of an otherwise in realization and formation. It is this otherwise which opens (rather than closes) this text, situates my thought and praxis, and gives substance, orientation and reason to what I have presented here as feminist reflections and provocations from the Andes. Notes 1  See Lewis Gordon’s Disciplinary Decadence, Eduoard Glissant’s The Poet­ ics of Relation and the work of Rolando Vazquez. 2  Lopez Austin cited in Marcos (2006). 3  The presence of an originary an­ drogynous feminine-masculine creative force can be seen in African ancestral cosmology, and most specifically in the Yorubian pantheon of spirituality celebrated throughout the Americas, in the figure of Odumare (or Oludumare),

but also in Chango. See Zapata Olivella (2010). 4  Such symmetry was clearly demonstrated in various testimonial texts of the time, including, in the Andes, Guaman Poma de Ayala’s let­ ters and drawings in Crónicas de buen gobierno (1615), and Francisco de Avila’s contracted Huarochiri Manuscripts (sixteenth century). In Mesoamerica Popul Vuh (sixteenth century) serves as an additional example. 5  Curiously enough, and in a

walsh  |   125 different sense, for Pratt the naturalistcollector figure also had a ‘certain androgyny about it; its production of knowledge has some decidedly nonphallic aspects …’ As such, and following Pratt, we can ask how he figures in the ‘natural’ order. Pratt (1992: 33). 6  Greer’s analysis of feminism in the seventeenth-century writings of María de Zayas in Spain is particularly enlightening in this regard. 7  While battles continue against extractivist politics and to make the application of Nature’s rights a reality, there is already legal precedent. See Green (2013). 8  Article 1, Law no. 300, 15 October 2012, my translation. See www.lexivox. org/norms/BO-L-N300.xhtml. 9  For Raul Prada, this watered-down version guarantees the ‘harmony’ of extractivism, situates economic-based ‘integral’ development as ‘living well’, and bolsters the ‘imaginary dominant archetype of the patriarchal State’. He argues that the law would be better named ‘father earth’ (Prada 2012). 10  The commercializing of an app game called the ‘The Age of Yasuni’ is evidence of one of the many ways the Yasuni Initiative ignited interest in post-oil politics across the globe. As the game’s description notes, ‘The Age of Yasuní game takes you to some of the most threatened hotspots – from the sands of the North Sea to the tributaries of the Niger Delta. You play as a local leader protecting traditional land from oil drilling.’ See netdonor.net/ea-action/ action?ea.client.id=1728&ea.campaign. id=12557. 11  See: Secretaria Nacional de Planificación y Desarrollo, ‘Boletín de Prensa No. 395 Iniciativa Yasuní-ITT: una apuesta ecuatoriana que marca un cambio de era’ (9 February 2013), www.planificacion.gob.ec/wp-content/ uploads/downloads/2013/02/BOLETÍN

_395_YASUNÍ_FANDER_08-02-13.pdf, accessed 10 February 2013. However, in a counter-view, and despite its impor­ tance, this initiative can also be viewed as an innovative marketing of Nature. 12  Of note is how this ‘other’ logic of Nature and Life is beginning to transverse the globe. In November 2010, Pittsburgh became the first US city to recognize the rights of Nature, taking a stance against a fossil gas extraction technique known as hydraulic fracturing or fracking. There are currently ap­ proximately thirty municipal ordinances for Nature’s rights and humans’ rights, ­halting gas drilling, toxic dumping, chemical seed clouding, water bottling and other forms of extractivism, and taking a stance against two central aspects of the US system of law: Nature as property and the ‘personhood of corporations’. The latter, established in 1886 by the US Supreme Court for the purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment and ratified again in 2010 in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, upholds the rights of corporations to make political expenditures under the First Amendment. 13  It is interesting to note that in a recent call for papers on sumak kawsay or buen vivir, the journal Iconos in Ecuador raised the question of whether buen vivir is not simply a recent inven­ tion since, as the journal’s call contends, there are no ethnographic studies to prove its existence. Of course, we can ask whether the call for ‘proof’ is not indicative of the ever-present Westerncentric geopolitics of knowledge and its androcentric discourse historically constructed as ‘universal’ and ‘scientific’. 14  See Earth First Newswire, earth­ firstnews.wordpress.com/2013/02/06/ amazonlandgrab/, accessed 4 March 2013. 15  See Alberto Acosta, ‘El uso de la justicia como mecanismo de terror’,

126   |  three El Universo, 8 February 2011, www. eluniverso.com/2011/02/08/1/1363/uso-­ justicia-­como-­mecanismo-­terror.html, accessed 4 November 2011. 16  Of note here is the growing presence of Chinese capital in Ecuador and the region, capital largely directed towards extractivist endeavours. China is currently Ecuador’s largest creditor, a position set to further grow with the projected financing of $13 billion by China’s Industrial and Commercial Bank and a Chinese oil firm of a major oil refinery on Ecuador’s Pacific coast. (See the Economist online article ‘Ecuador business: Chinese firms to fund Pacifico refinery’, 6 June 2012, news.zurichna. com/article/5854b22fcec0b7148ace570 260a0126e/ecuador-business-chinesefirms-to-finance-pacifico-refinery#.) 17  ‘Rafael Correa defiende con­ trato para explotación minera’, El Uni­ verso, 10 March 2012, www.eluniverso. com/2012/03/10/1/1355/rafael-correadefiende-contrato-explotacion-minera. html, accessed 15 March 2012. 18  See Paul Dosh and Nicole Kliger­ man, ‘Correa vs. social movements: showdown in Ecuador’, NACLA, 2011, nacla.org/article/correa-vs-socialmovements-showdown-ecuador. 19  Perelman argues that ‘what is really behind the indigenous struggle in defense of TIPNIS: to protect indigenous people’s autonomy, probably today these people’s most precious posses­ sion, precisely because it is autonomy that guarantees – maybe the only guarantee of – not disappearing as a people, society, and culture in front of the steamroller that is the globaliza­ tion of capital, in which the Bolivian government is just one nut or bolt more. This autonomist struggle, in its base, is anti-statist, against the legitimization of this territory and its populations by the state’ (cited in Carlos Crespo, ‘Tipnis y autonomía’, 10 December 2012, anarqui­

acochabamba.blogspot.com/2012/12/ tipnis-y-autonomia.html. 20  The Conga Project, negotiated between the Peruvian government and the Denver, Colorado-based Newmont Gold Corporation threatens to dry up four lagoons, contaminate water s­ources, and destroy the life and livelihood of 100,000-plus people. As of July 2011, Peru already had forty-three principal mining projects, with 65 per cent of the mining operations concentrated in four majority indigenous-peasant regions (Cajamarca, Apurimac, Moquegua, Arequipa). By 2012, close to a thousand leaders were facing police persecution and penal processes for defending water and life. 21  See ecuarunari.org/portal/ noticias/Declaración-del-3er-Congresode-CAOI, accessed 1 March 2013. 22 See Orlan Cazorla and Miriam García Torres, ‘Mujeres por la vida marchan desde la Amazonía hasta Quito’, Rebelión, 17 October 2013, www. rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=175630, ac­ cessed 20 November 2013. 23  This demonizaton of feminism as an imposition of the West was reiterated by Jesus Avirama, founding member of the Regional Indigenous Organization of Cauca, Colombia-CRIC, in his remarks at the Social Justice and Cultural SelfDetermination Conference organized by Duke University/University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, 8 February 2014. 24  See especially Gargalla (2013) and Méndez et al. (2013). 25  See the debates being produced as well by the network of decolonial feminism. For example, Yuderkys Espi­ nosa, Diana Gómez, María Lugones and Karina Ochoa, ‘Reflexiones pedagógicas en torno al feminismo descolonial: una conversa en cuatro voces’, in Espinosa et al. (2013). See also Virgina Vargas’s discussion of Latin American feminisms in the context of politics and democracy (Vargas 2008).

walsh  |   127 26  see ‘Declaration of Community Feminism at the World Conference of Peoples on Climate Change’ (Cocha­ bamba, Bolivia, April 2010), cited in Aguinaga et al. (2011: 78). 27  See Marcha Mundial de Mujeres and ALAI, ‘Feminismo popular para cambiar el mundo’, América Latina en movimiento, 489, October 2013, p. 1.

References Acosta, A. (2010) ‘Toward the universal declaration of rights of nature, thoughts for action’, alainet.org/ images/Acosta%20DDNN_ingl.pdf, accessed 4 November 2011. — (2011) ‘El uso de la justicia como mecanismo de terror’, El Universo, 8 February, www.eluniverso.com/ 2011/02/08/1/1363/uso-­justicia-­ como-­mecanismo-­terror.html, accessed 4 November 2011. — (2012) ‘El retorno del estado. Primeros pasos postneoliberales, mas no postcapitalistas’, Observa­ torio Económico de América Latina, 8 May, www.obela.org/contenido/ retorno-del-estado-primeros-pasospostneoliberales-mas-no-post­ capitalistas, accessed 20 February 2013. Aguinaga, M., M. Lang, D. Mokrani and A. Santillana (2011) ‘Pensar desde el feminism: críticas y alternativas al desarrollo’, Más allá del desarrollo, Grupo permanente de trabajo sobre alternativas al desarrollo, Quito: Abya Yala/Fundación Rosa Luxem­ burg, pp. 55–82. Cazorla, O. and M. García Torres (2013) ‘Mujeres por la vida marchan desde la Amazonía hasta Quito’, Rebelión, 17 October, www.rebelion.org/ noticia.php?id=175630. Dussel, E. (2011) Seminar in ‘Filosofía política en América Latina hoy’, Quito: Doctorado en Estudios Culturales Latinoamericanos, Univer­

sidad Andina Simón Bolívar, vimeo. com/channels/seminariodussel. Espinosa, Y., D. Gómez, M. Lugones and K. Ochoa (2013) ‘Reflexiones pedagógicas en torno al feminismo descolonial: una conversa en cuatro voces’, in C. Walsh (ed.), Pedagogías decoloniales: prácticas insurgentes de resistir, (re)existir y (revivir), Quito: Abya Yala. Gargalla, F. (2013) Feminismos desde Abya Yala. Ideas y proposiciones de las mujeres de 607 pueblos en nuestra América, La Paz: Editorial Autodeter­ minación. Green, N. (2013) ‘The first success­ ful case of the rights of nature implementation in Ecuador’, Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, therightsofnature.org/first-ron-caseecuador/, accessed 25 February 2013. Greer, M. R. (2000) María de Zayas Tells Baroque Tales of Love and the Cruelty of Men, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Horswell, M. (2005) Decolonizing the Sodomite, Austin: University of Texas Press. Kumar, C. (1994) ‘The south wind: towards new cosmologies’, in W. ­Harcourt (ed.), Feminist Perspec­ tives on Sustainable Development, London: Zed Books/Society for International Development. Lugones, M. (2012) ‘Methodological notes toward a decolonial feminism’, in A. M. Isasi-Díaz and E. Mendieta (eds), Decolonizng Epistemologies. Latina/o Theology and Philosophy, New York: Fordham. Marcha Mundial de Mujeres and ALAI (2013) ‘Feminismo popular para cambiar el mundo’, América Latina en movimiento, 489: 1. Marcos, S. (2006) Taken from the Lips. Gender and Eros in Mesoamerican Religions, Boston, MA: Brill. Méndez, G., J. López, S. Marcos and

128   |  three C. Osorio (eds) (2013) Senti-pensar el género. Perspectivas desde los pueblos originarios, Guadalajara: Taller Edit­ orial la Casa del Mago. Paredes, J. (2012) Hilando fino. Desde el feminismo comunitario, Querétaro, Mexico: Grietas (1st edn La Paz, 2010). Prada, R. (2012) ‘La fuerza de la ley y el padre tierra’, Document circulated on the internet, 28 August. Pratt, M. L. (1992) Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation, New York: Routledge. Quijano, A. (2000) ‘Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America’, Nepantla: Views from South, 1(3). — (2010) ‘América Latina: hacia un nuevo sentido histórico’, in I. León (ed.), Sumak Kawsay/Buen Vivir y cambios civilizatorios, Quito: Fedaeps. Schmitt, C. (2003 [1950]) The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen, Telos Press. Secretaria Nacional de Planificación y Desarrollo (2013) ‘Boletín de prensa no. 395 Iniciativa Yasuní-ITT: una apuesta ecuatoriana que marca un cambio de era’, 9 February, www. planificacion.gob.ec/wp-content/

uploads/downloads/2013/02/ BOLETÍN_395_YASUNÍ_FANDER_ 0802-13.pdf, accessed 10 February 2013. Segato, R. (forthcoming) ‘La norma y el sexo: frente estatal, patriar­ cado, desposesión, colonialidad’, in M. Belausteguigoiti and J. Saldaña (eds), Desposesión: género, territorio y luchas por los recursos naturales, Mexico: PUEG/UNAM, Debate Fem­inista e Instituto de Liderazgo Simone de Beauvoir. Silverblatt, I. (1990) Luna, sol y brujas. Género y clase en los Andes prehis­ pánicos y coloniales, Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos Bartolomé de las Casas. Smith, L. T. (1999) Decolonizing Method­ ologies. Research and Indigenous Peoples, London: Zed Books. Vargas, V. (2008) Feminismos en América Latina. Su aporte a la política y a la democracia, Lima: Programa Democ­ racia y Transformación Social. Walsh, C. (2010) ‘Development as Buen Vivir: institutional arrangements and (de)colonial entanglements’, Develop­ ment, 53(1): 15–21. Zapata Olivella, M. (2010) Changó, el gran putas, Bogotá: Ministerio de Cultura.

4 | FEMINIST POLITICAL ECOLOGY AND THE (UN)MAKING OF ‘HEROES’: ENCOUNTERS IN MOZAMBIQUE

Ingrid L. Nelson

Introduction The persistent desire for and the making and celebrating of hero figures in environmental and other justice struggles trouble me. I sense this trouble even in cases when hero figures champion agendas that fit fairly well within a feminist political ecology politics, such as in the activism of Wangari Matthai or Vandana Shiva (see Rocheleau, this volume). I feel troubled about the celebration of hero figures despite my excitement and relief when the bodies becoming or being made into heroes are not the oft-critiqued paternalistic white saviours or the solemnly remembered war heroes turned Mozambican presidents: persons such as Mozambicans who walk through their woodlands as community ‘forest police’ attempting to prevent further illegal logging. I like many relatively recent Mozambican heroes, their labours of love and their political causes. They displace more obviously problematic heroes, which appears to signify much-needed progress in a broader decolonial and eco-social project. But as likable and ‘radical’ as these new hero figures seem to be, the persistent desire for and celebration of hero figures warrant critical reflection. Questioning the making and unmaking of hero figures is part of analysing dominant narratives of crisis surrounding climate change, terrorism, nuclear disaster, global hunger and other problems that seem to intensify calls for hero figures. Many of us take satisfaction and relief in being saved or protected by one messianic hero or another (Praise Jesus! Or Nelson Mandela or possibly various versions of the Earth Mother Goddess … or whomever). We live in an era when heroes supposedly serve as major figures in our imaginaries, our future capacity as a species and as a ‘global’ society. Romanticizing hero figures, however, can overshadow the great variety of banal practices constituting daily lives and serving as catalysts for

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broader patterns of change. Put in the context of the scope of this book, this chapter examines some of the practices that I have observed through encounters with colleagues and friends living and/or working in the woodlands of Mozambique. I ask what exactly does making and celebrating heroes do vis-à-vis the contradictory practices of a range of ordinary and not-so-ordinary actors? Reading and teaching post-colonial critiques of ‘great white saviours’ I do not claim insider or outsider status in Mozambique, although others simultaneously place me in those mutually exclusive categories and there is not much that I can do about it or perform otherwise short of cutting off all of my ties in Mozambique or planting my head in the dirt (see Tabassi’s comments and her Figure 10.3, this volume). Since 2003, I have engaged in particular spaces in varying capacities in Mozambique and this is sometimes welcome, other times unwelcome, and connects professional, political and personal relationships and realms. I have loved, married, divorced, fought, studied, listened, pounded cassava, been shaped by and continue to engage with many Mozambican lives and realities. I learned work songs while hauling timber with my neighbours in the woodlands of Zambézia, wrote public essays with and for my long-time friends in the Mozambican environmental justice organization Justiça Ambiental, and danced and sang in Maputo’s lively music scene with friends who have extended family who have driven trucks loaded with timber to the ports of Quelimane and Nacala. These encounters are not categorically good or bad, but they are fraught with power dynamics, contradictions, positionalities, privileges and losses. Alongside my research and life in Mozambique, I currently teach courses in political ecology and international environmental studies in the Department of Geography and the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Vermont (UVM). The UVM community prides itself on having one of the oldest formalized university environmental studies programmes in the United States of America (founded in 1972). Located in the second-whitest state,1 many UVM students self-identify as activists and intend to volunteer within the USA or abroad either during or after their university studies.2 In my classes, I frequently unpack the ‘great white saviour’ figure. I do so by combining excerpts from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s (2009) Technology, Entertainment,

nelson  |   133 Design (TED) talk entitled ‘The danger of a single story’, Binyavanga Wainaina’s (2005) essay entitled ‘How to write about Africa’, the SAIH music video Africa for Norway (Radi-Aid) (2012), which spoofs poorly thought-out aid projects that draw heavily on stereotypes of ‘Africa’, and excerpts from Donna Haraway’s essay ‘Teddy bear patriarchy: taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–1936’ (1985). In more advanced courses, I include excerpts from the work of Edward Said (1978, 1981), bell hooks (1989/1992), Uma Narayan (1997, 1998; see also Narayan and Harding 2000), Chandra Mohanty (1984, 1991) and the writings and lectures of my former professors from my undergraduate studies, Ifi Amadiume (1987, 1997, 2000, 2002) and Judith Byfield (2001, 2002, 2003), whose work also inspires me to broaden my conversations with my Nigerian cousins living in the United Kingdom, Nigeria and the USA. My experience as a student of Ifi Amadiume, who is an ardent critic of white do-gooder women in global women’s rights initiatives, led me to retreat temporarily from academic inquiry entailing ‘Others’ in order to avoid perpetuating cultural imperialism and classism (Amadiume 2000). In some ways I surely repeat aspects of these histories and contribute to the ongoing construction of white, gendered and classed bourgeois subjects within capitalist relations of colonial empire and post-colonial, neoliberal contexts (see McClintock 1995; Stoler 1995, 2002). The effects of such practices, however, are diverse and difficult to see from one perspective or standpoint. At times I am a nuisance to loggers, environmentalists, NGO staff and woodland residents, and at other times I am useful in their strategic chess game, and in other moments I am merely there, nobody gives a damn, and I do not in fact matter. I typically adopt a humble attitude towards my ability to articulate all of my impacts and non-impacts, as  one of the best limits on my capacity to harm, help and act is in fact my lack of ability to see all of the ripple effects and non-effects of capillary actions in various worlds. Formal academic critiques of whiteness and gendered imperatives of ‘helping’ (see Kosek 2004, 2006; Heron 2007) are spreading to more mainstream and popular blogs and social media platforms to the point where many of my students are slightly more aware of post-colonial critiques before the first day of my courses. For example, the satirical publication The Onion recently posted a short online piece entitled ‘6-day visit to rural African village completely changes woman’s Facebook profile picture’ (2014), about a fictional

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twenty-two-year-old named Angela Fisher, with a photo showing a young, white woman smiling as she sits with two black children who look away from the camera. The final line of the article claims, ‘Since returning, Fisher said she has been encouraging every one of her friends to visit Africa, promising that it would change their Facebook profile photos as well.’ This article mocks common gendered and racialized images on NGO websites, in media reports and celebrity photo ops, and in Peace Corps recruitment posters. At a superficial level, the short satirical piece in The Onion extends post-colonial critiques of whiteness into the contemporary context in which those who access the World Wide Web regularly also co-create the helping and saving imaginaries that they consume or ‘prosume’ through voluntourism and related activities (see Beer and Burrows 2010; Zwick et al. 2008; Büscher and Igoe 2013). The mock heroine figure of Angela Fisher in the Onion piece presents the stereotypical – though not the actual – undergraduate students with whom I interact, in addition to my other work of researching and collaborating with colleagues, friends, activists and family in Mozambique. The real­ities tying such critical narratives to roots and relations are far more complex, however, than mere uncritical, privileged, white and female individuals embodying a ‘helping imperative’, having ‘taken action’ online for the latest ‘Save the [insert ‘Africa’, ‘children’, ‘environment’, ‘animals’, ‘women’ here]’ campaign. Hero worship and narratives permeate much of the cultural politics within the United States, but the making of hero figures differs across geopolitical contexts. Part of the broader socialist project during the struggle for independence from Portuguese colonization included a promise of women’s emancipation in a new and socialist Mozambican society (Arnfred 1988). Thus, alongside charismatic male leaders such as Eduardo Mondlane, Samora Machel and others whose commemoration continues through the inscription of their names in the country’s infrastructure (including streets, schools, bridges and imposing ­statues strategically placed at roundabouts), Mozambican cultural and nation­alist politics also visibly celebrate key women heroines (Disney 2008). Propaganda from the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO)3 included many images of the late Josina Machel in combat fatigues, participating in strategic meetings with fighters, holding weapons and working with her husband Samora Machel, who became the first Mozambican president (Matusse and Malique

nelson  |   135 2008). The national Mozambican Women’s Day holiday commemorates Josina Machel’s death on 7 April 1971. Other photographic propaganda displayed women holding AK-47s in their hands with their babies tucked into familiar capulana4 bundles on their backs and women dancing and marching in rallies with their local chapters of the Organização da Mulhere Moçambicana (OMM),5 the women’s arm of FRELIMO (Arnfred 1988; Disney 2008). In the Mozambican woodlands, teenaged girls living near by explained to me that they hoped that when they received or bought a new capulana skirt at the local market it might be that year’s latest design with the bust of Josina Machel portrayed in the centre: ‘Ingrid, are they selling the new Josina Machel capulanas in town yet?’ my neighbours repeatedly asked me. Thus, hero and heroine worship plays a persistent role in Mozambican national identity and cultural politics. As I examine the making of new hero figures in the woodlands of Mozambique, I am mindful of how hero discourse and practices play out differently across socialist, liberal and other geopolitical and social movement contexts. Pointing out the contradictions embodied by hero and heroine figures has served as a useful starting point in my own reflections and in discussions with students and colleagues (see the excellent critique of FPE debates by Mollett and Faria 2013), but I think it is important to start, not finish, with such glaring contradictions through our critical analyses of the heroes that we love to question and those heroes that we love to celebrate. Our heroes’ contradictions do not make them less praiseworthy (or fund-worthy or theory-worthy). I focus on the practices and discourses that make such contradictions possible. I am not concerned with calling one person ‘hero’ and another ‘villain’, or with tracing a history of the idea of the hero figure ‘across space and time’ or developing theories or frameworks concerning the differences between the construction of feminine heroines and masculine heroes (see Walsh’s review, this volume, of the Aguinaga et al. 2011 rebuttal of the oversimplification of such feminine figures and the leading roles of ‘third gender’ figures in diverse cosmovisions). For FPE this could connect to an ongoing debate regarding the heroine figure of the Earth Mother Goddess in ecofeminist theory and practice (see Leach 2007 and Moore 2008). Many ecofeminist celebrations of Earth Mother figures essentialized the role of women in knowing and caring for nature, which provoked feminist scholars who worked methodically to debunk essentialisms about women ‘in

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general’, whether or not those essentialisms were perceived as positive. It is not appropriate to completely dismiss or refuse the goddess figure. Rather, it is more fruitful to accept her contradictions and the practices of those who link up with her and then focus on the work that these contradictions perform in the broader socio-ecological and political landscape. One insightful example is Anna Tsing’s (2005) research on the interactions of environmental movement participants and diverse others in the rainforests of Indonesia, in which Tsing traces the effects of the strategic and nuanced uses of various essentialisms about knowing and protecting nature. A similar approach could apply to practices rooted in the concepts of buen vivir and pachemama in the Andes (see Walsh, this volume). As static figures or concepts, they are inadequate, and that is not their origin or worldview(s). Making the Earth Mother Goddess into a heroine and transforming ‘buen vivir’ into curio (see Harcourt, Knox and Tabassi, this volume) and uncritically appropriating these figures into strategic action are also inadequate yet predictable practices among many scholars and activists. The Earth Mother Goddess and other hero figures are and do so much more, and at the same time not enough. While I do not conduct a ‘global’ analysis here of the specific heroines celebrated by academics and activists within FPE more broadly, I think it is useful to observe how heroes (variously gendered) are made and unmade within movements and communities of practice within their specific contexts. If we focus only on the ideological contradictions embodied by these heroes and dismiss them as false heroes or celebrate the heroines that fit best with our ideological leanings, then we miss the discourses and practices that make their contradictions, their becoming and their undoing possible. Responding to persistent desires for heroes In 2010 in the woodlands of rural Zambézia, Mozambique, I approached Simão, a licensed timber boss who had been illegally cutting hardwoods outside of the area designated on his licence.6 I requested Simão’s permission to ride along with the men who worked for him hauling the timber, in order to record their work songs. The men – who were my neighbours in the community where I had been living and conducting ethnography for months – had already invited me along to do so. I reasoned that performing this formality with Simão might reduce my chances of getting shot by a truck or tractor driver in the process.

nelson  |   137 Simão was in the middle of a meeting with different local leaders, who wanted to resolve the ongoing conflict concerning Simão’s timbercutting activities and who wanted him to pay them for the timber he had already taken. One local leader had banned him from the area indicated in his licence owing to an error on the government-issued map and his failure to engage local political relations to resolve the error. Simão had been stealing timber from a neighbouring leader’s territory, and the territory of one of only two pending communityrun timber concessions in the whole of Mozambique (see Nelson 2012, 2013a). With the leaders listening and watching, Simão surprised me when he answered my request to record the men’s work songs. Rather than bar me from his trucks as I expected, based on his veiled threats in our earlier encounters, Simão had a different agenda. He wanted to craft himself as a hero figure to residents of this woodland community, to district-level politicians, to middle-class Mozambicans and to foreigners. He spoke to me in English, Portuguese and Nyaringa at strategic moments in front of local residents and leaders to perform his connections abroad, and access to investment and to political figures. Simão had received his university degree in another predominantly ‘white’ state in the United States and proclaimed his desire to ‘develop’ his ‘native land’. He wanted to speak back to texts about gender in Mozambique that he had read while studying in the United States, such as Stephanie Urdang’s And Still They Dance: Women, war and the struggle for change in Mozambique (1989). He argued that such women-focused analyses unfairly portrayed African men as villains and perpetrators of violence, and he suggested that my request to speak with more men and record their work songs might add more depth to research on gender. Seeing that I had a camera that could also record video, he asked whether I would – in addition to discussing Mozambican men with greater nuance – make a documentary about him developing his homeland (I declined this request by explaining the broader goals of my research and work focused on and with residents of this woodland area). Simão had encountered the prevalence of both a feminine helping imperative pervading US perceptions of ‘Africa’ and a broader development discourse during his studies in the USA and his experiences of development interventions by international organizations and national women’s organizations in Mozambique. Simão appealed to what he thought would be my stereotypical female

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and white ‘helping imperative’ that he had repeatedly encountered in and beyond Mozambique (see Heron 2007). He imagined that, finally, a black Mozambican man from the region would do the saving and developing of these poor rural communities – never mind his theft of hardwoods from the local community-run concession. In thinking about Simão’s efforts to perform the role of hero and patron (patrão), is it enough to merely dismiss him as a ‘false’ hero or to label him as a villain because of his contradictory behaviour or logic? What I am interested in is how he deployed and practised hero narratives tied to broader discourses in development inter­vention and to his awareness of the power of post-colonial and feminist critique, and what his actions and relations with the local community and myself contributed to in the broader power relations in the woodlands of Zambézia. His conduct might encourage FPE to reflect further on the hero figure beyond expressing indignation at the hero’s contradictions or distinguishing false heroes from those that are more deserving of celebration and adulation.

Saving and protecting  One theme that I find particularly important to revisit regarding the persistence of desiring to become or be saved by hero figures is the concept of protection. Saving and protecting are pervasive in the conduct of governing. In her analysis of protection narratives directed towards Muslim women in Iraq and Afghanistan and towards the US ‘public’ in the context of the second US war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, Iris Marion Young (2003: 2) questions the paternalistic state as protector: … an exposition of the gendered logic of the masculine role of protector in relation to women and children illuminates the meaning and effective appeal of a security state that wages war abroad and expects obedience and loyalty at home. In this patriarchal logic, the role of the masculine protector puts those protected, paradigmatic­ ally women and children, in a subordinate position of dependence and obedience. To the extent that citizens of a democratic state ­allow their leaders to adopt a stance of protectors toward them, these citizens come to occupy a subordinate status like that of women in the patriarchal household. We are to accept a more authoritarian and paternalistic state power, which gets its support partly from the unity a threat produces and our gratitude for protection.

nelson  |   139 Young argues that despite the possible pleasure and sense of safety in protection, failing to follow the protector’s rules at home often results in the protector’s use of domestic violence to maintain control. The role of protector thus proves paternalistic and dangerous.7 One of the scariest tasks can be trying to predict the violent potential of a protective do-gooder when one rejects their ‘well-intentioned’ protection (bell hooks 1989/1992 discussed this fear in relation to openly discussing whiteness in a multiracial classroom). Beyond questioning obvious patriarchal figures such as Simão, martyrs and goddesses too require critical reflection. My own discomfort with the valorization of the violence of martyrdom in Christianity and salvation narratives combined with the post-colonial voices that I read in my scholarship and beyond have made me very sceptical and profoundly uncomfortable with not just the great white saviour figure, but with any messianic and charismatic saviour figure and requisite ego. Saviour and saved are about as illustrative as subject and object or other binaries. The contradictions and menacing potential of figures such as Simão are easier to dismissively categorize. But what happens when someone that excites and inspires feminist political ecologists, activists and others alike begins to perform the role of the hero figure, regardless of their embrace or rejection of this role? What if they are Josina Machel or the courageous residents of the Mozambican woodlands standing up to a timber boss working with thirty men hauling timber? In the remainder of this chapter, I demonstrate how some men in the woodlands of Zambézia have responded to their being caught up in and their co-creation of a shifting discourse that transforms them from victims of ruthless timber bosses into timber thieves and then into forest heroes. The broader move to give these men a ‘sacred status’ as new kinds of heroes in a project against deforestation obscures the fact that these men engage in a multitude of practices to navigate local and regional power relations and shifting demands to save trees and cut timber. Research in practice Before I detail the complexities of the practices of such likable and laudable figures, it is important to consider the crucial counter-conduct that celebrating or making hero figures can obfuscate. My intended analytical move regarding hero figures is not to focus on ‘the idea’ of heroes, or the structural political-economic causes of particular issues

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taken up by heroes. These themes are already fairly heavily examined and critiqued (see Dan Brockington’s 2009 discussion of celebrities as ‘heroes’ in conservation). In problematizing the words ‘dissidence’ and ‘dissident’, Michel Foucault (2007: 202) argues, There is a process of sanctification or hero worship which does not seem to me of much use. On the other hand, by using the word counter-conduct, and so without having to give a sacred status to this or that person as the dissident, we can no doubt analyze the components in the way in which someone actually acts in the very general field of politics or in the very general field of power relations; it makes it possible to pick out the dimension or component of counter-conduct that may well be found in fact in delinquents, mad people, and patients.

Foucault calls on researchers to study exactly what people do (practice) and what they say (discourse) in order to develop a ‘history of thought’ rather than the history of a particular idea. I think many feminist political ecologists have attempted innovative ways to combine empirical approaches with diverse epistemologies in their research (see Nightingale 2003 and Rocheleau 1995). Multiple forms of research performed by differently situated researchers are important – taking into consideration limits to time and resources – for recognizing patterns, for generating new FPE knowledge, discussions and processes, but an approach that merely attempts to extract and collect all perspectives in a melting-pot approach to knowledge-making is also problematic. Gayatri Spivak (1990) argues that some knowledge is incompatible and not translatable across cultures, which renders certain privileged positionings as also a loss (see also Ferguson 2000). This incompatibility of knowledge necessitates conflict-ridden collaboration and engagement in a way that others ‘might be able to answer back’ (McEwan 2003: 409). There are limits to researchers’ abilities to reflect experiences and realities of the lives of differently identified individuals, but it is also true that we often do not recognize patterns in our own behaviour and discourse within our various groups, and we may inadvertently ignore an important daily practice because it seems so ‘obvious’. Drawing the above themes together, my epistemological approach in this chapter relies on situated empirical practice, with the purpose of understanding relations, practices and the productive forces of power as they come together in troubling

nelson  |   141 encounters. My ethnographic writing always indicates that I am part of the encounters that I describe (when I am in fact there). As I explore the making of heroes I keep coming back to practicecentred approaches that focus on the relations that produce people and things and on ‘what people do’ rather than on particular ideologies or objects of inquiry. A practice-centred approach requires finding ways to set aside the desire to uncover people’s ‘real opinions’ through interviews and surveys alone. In nearly every one of my surveys, respondents lied.8 In my interviews, respondents said one thing and then did something different (sometimes in my presence, and at other times not). This is not merely a matter of redesigning survey instruments or improving interview questions or identifying a universal truth that explains these contradictions ‘in general’. What people did and what I did in relation to others, and what they did and said in relation to me, yielded different information than my more structured research instruments.9 Thus, the logging boss Simão assumed that I was asking his permission ‘to study Mozam­ bican men’ in general through their work songs, but this was not my goal. By participating in and observing the logging, I was made aware of practices and jokes and performances which elucidated shifting constructions of masculine identities rooted in past generations’ labouring on sugar plantations and current anxieties about work, love, sex, family, obligation and beyond, which were performed differently depending on how the encounter unfolded and on the particular actors involved in the encounter. As an example, in the woodlands of Zambézia I sat with José10 in front of his second wife’s house, asking him whether he carried timber for the furtivos.11 He said ‘no’. When I explained that I saw him with the other men carrying timber and I asked why he carried timber for the furtivos, he responded, ‘For the money, of course.’ When I asked why he still carried timber after the district authorities had apprehended two timber trucks and the men did not receive their wages, he replied, ‘What are my other options?’ When I asked him to describe the experience of carrying timber, he responded with mechanistic facts such as: arriving in the forest before sunrise to be selected for work, riding on the truck to the loading site, hauling timber with other men all day, suffering from pains and receiving his wage of 100 MZN (less than US$4.00) and a small amount of food, before bathing at night and going home. José maintained his

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focus on basic facts, which did not illustrate his interactions with other men during the day. In contrast, several days later, when I carried timber with José and fifteen other men, we argued with the other men about how to load the logs efficiently. We sang about their anxieties concerning their wives taking control of their hard-earned money or demanding new capulanas. We sang about the timber boss’s mother being a ‘whore’ after he reprimanded them for working too slowly. We sang about some men being stronger and more capable than others. Some men stubbed toes and experienced injuries. Jambirre (Millettia stuhlmannii) bark flew into our eyes and on to our bodies. Some of the older men complained of aches and pains and were excited at the prospect of buying liquor with their earnings. Others argued over how a white woman could carry timber and what category of woman I was (or was becoming). A few of the younger men revved the chainsaw and posed with their friends in front of my camera. The process of carrying timber represented a layered performance of memory and gendered identity formation linked to changing masculinities and particular living colonial memories.12 The different forms of information exchanged in my interviews with José and the knowledge exchanged while carrying logs with José and other men raise key epistemological questions. Which information is ‘true’? Which information is analytically significant (towards what analytical agenda) and for whom? What are the effects and ethics of studying and learning with one another in these ‘field’ encounters? By paying more attention to what people actually do and what they say in different encounters, and to how these actions are co-constituted with other people and things in the world, we can understand sociopolitical-ecological relationships as they become: as processes in webs of unequal relations within specific historical moments. Foucault critiques how certain words make us believe ‘in the existence of natural objects’ (the hero in the case of this chapter), which extends out of Foucault’s study of the history of thinking about ‘population’, ‘crime’ and ‘sex’, among other categories, and how they became problematized and sites of intervention. I think Foucault’s attention to practice and discourse is critical for understanding environmental and social justice conflicts in Mozambique and elsewhere and how they become problems. They become problems for illegal logging networks, for environmental NGOs and for other actors, albeit in

nelson  |   143 different ways. The hero figure is a technology of government made and unmade by ‘activists’, governments and corporations alike, even as the hero body broadens to include the woman, the rural teenager or even, in some cases, the non-human13 in exciting new combinations. Recently in Mozambique, the identity categories that can become hero have broadened, but the role and figure of hero continue to raise questions for me, about what hero practices and discourse produce in terms of bodies and landscapes and power relations in which they become entangled in broader contexts and historical configurations. Heroic anxieties Different groups of men (and some women) in the woodlands of Zambézia are caught between simultaneous efforts to portray them as victims and thieves or as heroic forest protectors. My situated observations of these cases involve my participation in and relating with and among those involved in making specific men’s bodies into hero figures. Many NGO staff, reporters, environmental activists and others actively attempt to transform young men into heroes who monitor and police forests and woodlands threatened by illegal logging. This not only reflects anxiety about saving trees from chainsaws and large handsaws, it also reflects anxiety about providing opportunities for young men who might become victims, thieves or violent perpetrators otherwise. What can we learn by redirecting our focus away from the particular ideologies at play, towards the everyday practices of banal actors and the way they embody new patterns and modes of environmental and development thought as heroes and as makers of heroes?

Making and unmaking victims, thieves and heroes in Mozambique14  In a report entitled ‘China storms Africa’ in the business magazine Fast Company, the investigative financial journalist Richard Behar recounted his visit to a forest community in the district where I conducted my research. Behar investigated illegal logging in the area by visiting the ‘field office of Madeiras Alman, a unit of a Taiwanese conglomerate and one of the largest exporters of timber from Mozambique back to mainland China’ (Behar 2008: 100). He and a forest technician from a regional rural development organization called ORAM-Zambézia (Organização Rural d Aduja Mútua – Rural Association for Mutual Support) encountered the office (a trailer in the woods) with no company managers present, but soon found themselves surrounded

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by frustrated local men who had received only $25 when they were owed $120 for three months of timber hauling work (ibid.). Behar portrayed these men as victims in need of saving from their povertystricken situation at the hands of China’s ruthless resource extraction in Africa:15 They are short men, under 5 feet tall, and wear ripped clothes that are likely Chinese knockoffs. A man named Pedro sports a Sean John shirt, another an orange David Beckham tee, while a third reads Vogue Paris. One man’s cap informs me that This is the closest thing to a handyman this family’s got. Many are barefoot, with bloodshot eyes and missing teeth, flies moving in and out of their mouths … ‘We have the power to remove this office,’ one man shouts. In fact, they have no power at all.

This description focuses on a particular set of predetermined ideo­ logies or categories (e.g. poor rural labourers and their victimization at the hands of ruthless logging bosses) rather than the practices or counter-conduct of these men. What about the actual practices of singing while hauling timber and moments of encounter performed by José and the other men that I recounted earlier, or the detailed and complex manipulations and practices of timber boss Simão? These are completely missing from Behar’s portrayal of short, powerless men with ‘flies moving in and out of their mouths’, who in that moment spoke a sentence confirming what the reporter wanted to hear about an abusive timber boss. Behar’s portrayal creates a space for hero figures to swoop in to save these victimized men. In the current neoliberal development context, such heroes are now also expected to come from within the group of victims as part of a neoliberal self-help and local responsibility mantra (i.e. local men becoming local forest police and managing the forest). A popular site of intervention now pinpoints a crisis of masculinity in broader globalizing and neoliberal economic relations, with men as victims of narrow expectations and possibilities for the performance of masculinity and as workers in extremely precarious conditions (see Paulson 2013). Another common and rather incurious perspective expressed by foreign donors and some environmental activists is that log haulers, those who hire them and local leaders are ‘bad’ community members and thieves (villains). In a public debate in Maputo on 20 and 21 September 2012,

nelson  |   145 the director of the Mozambican rural development organization ORAM-Zambézia and the director of Justiça Ambiental among ­others discussed the difficulties with the ongoing community-run forest concession projects that they were supporting with funds from the European Union and Oxfam-Novib. A representative of the European Union expressed dismay when she learned about individual leaders who were not sharing the revenues of one of the projects with the broader community, and others who were suspected of using the community association’s new sawmill to process not only their legally cut timber but to funnel illegally procured timber through the mill as their own on behalf of furtivos. The director of ORAM-Zambézia, Laurenço Duvane, responded: All of us know that when a logger arrives in a forest area and wants to cut or rob timber, he goes to the leader. With or without authorization this is who says where the logger is allowed to cut. I don’t like to say that in these situations, legal or not, the leader does not redistribute the income to the community … What we have verified is that in reality at times the leaders are lured by such tiny things (for example a radio or bicycles) and the furtivos take advantage of this situation … And now should this be that this is a leader? I don’t know but this is how it appears to me … These are the constraints that exist. But in our point of view, in what we have done in terms of civic education, we told leaders not to enter into these schemes because this is not correct and not legal. The leader can’t sell common products, in this case forests, for the benefit of himself or the community because there has to be a correct transaction for this to be done.16

Donors obsess over diagnosing specific causes of corruption and they attempt to bypass local lineage networks and distinguish ‘legit­ imate’ from ‘illegitimate’ leaders via ideological tests of whether ­elections were held or whether a local leader promotes equity over his lineage connections and performs as a benevolent ‘protector’ of an abstract community body. Agostinho Jaime Pequenino, a representative from the Comité de Gestâo dos Recursos Florestais e Faunisticos do Nipiodi (­COGERFN) community forest project, which was funded and supported by the above-mentioned donors, NGO and activists, responded to the Euro­ pean Union representative’s anxiety and judgement over corrupt

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community leaders and to the project director’s comments about their efforts to educate leaders to distribute the benefits of projects in the ‘correct’ way. Pequenino shifted the discourse into a direction that had recently taken hold in activist and NGO strategies in rural communities faced by increasing illegal logging intensity. He portrayed rural would-be loggers and woodland residents as transformed into forest-protecting heroes: There have been certain situations in which the community leaders tried to take timber illegally, bringing the furtivos into the concession. But one day they met with all of the leaders and there were debates between them and the members of the committee, and they reached the conclusion that the benefits should be for all of the communities, and never for the benefit of each leader individually. If they benefit one person, our children will not have desks or chairs in school, and as they are the future of the community, they need to study. For example, in the last assembly that occurred on the 3rd of August, we debated with others in a conflict with a logger who tried to enter the concession. He asked assistance from the district government but since they didn’t have transport, all of the leaders and the general population were invited to be present to debate the question. We went to the tractor and expelled the furtivos. Today, therefore, the five communities covered [in the concession] are fighting together against these people.

When Pequenino – a beneficiary of the authority given to him to speak through his involvement in the COGERFN community concession – recounted the story of leaders coming together and agreeing to keep illegal loggers out of the concession, and the story of expelling the tractor from their area, he stood in front of stakeholders who have a heavy investment in this project succeeding. They have invested in the idea of a project that ‘benefits the entire community’. They see favouritism practised by leaders as nepotism and corruption, or, according to Ana Monge of the EU, as ‘a very negative aspect’. Agostinho’s story had to present a victory in the context of constant pressure to redefine and remake local leaders. Association members and leaders had to become heroes protecting their forests and their ‘community’. But the actual lives and practices of these association members and leaders in relation to kinship networks and various opportunities to earn cash and other connections and benefits say

nelson  |   147 more about the way NGOs intervene and governments govern in these woodlands than about the so-called integrity or blameworthiness of particular heroes. When environmental activists and NGOs and others enrol local leaders and other men in associations and train them to police and protect the forest as community fiscais,17 they are asking these men to become contradictory heroes and obvious targets for developmentalist outsiders and friends and family who cut logs for money and protest at unacceptable behaviour by timber bosses. What does making these men into heroes do? What do these men already do in relation to their families, forests and institutions of government? Some timber bosses such as Simão (mentioned above) have taken up the hero narrative quite readily. I analysed work songs and spoke with men (such as José, mentioned earlier) about their experiences carrying timber and I compared these with the experiences of those who refused to carry timber because they had invested in the success of the community forest concession project, and who instead spent time policing or patrolling the woodlands despite intimidation, fear and other obstacles. I found that policing does not provide the same form of bonding and opportunities for collective masculine identity formation that group hauling of timber in unison while singing obscenities does.18 Although building one’s masculinity through day-to-day log carrying is not the only way to construct manhood for all men in the community, these practices shape how some men articulate their position and their experiences in society, which has far-reaching impacts in their extended families and villages, and ultimately shapes how conflicts with loggers, ORAM and environmentalists play out. Beyond foreign donors and national NGOs beholden to donor demands, Mozambican environmental activists based in Maputo display deep anxiety about lineage-based and hierarchical practices of distributing the benefits of the projects they implement. Members of Justiça Ambiental (JA!) continue to seriously reflect on this very complicated issue. They understand that these issues are extremely challenging to address in a way that will satisfy the worldviews and perspectives of European donors, formal law, their own convictions about environmental justice and the priorities and motivations of competing families and peoples living in the woodlands. I asked JA! members to describe key moments or issues during the project that led to major changes in their understanding of the project

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and in their practices. Their first realization was that the information in the reports received from their partner organizations was completely different from what they observed on the ground, and so ‘we decided to do our own analysis’. During their analysis they found some limited evidence that one community project leader facilitated the processing of illegal timber through their community sawmill. But their most detailed response concerned their visceral reaction to the failure of local leadership and lineage hierarchies to share with the whole community during an event that we had planned together in 2011: The third issue was during the party with Ingrid [when she showed a movie of scenes from the research that she did], in Muzo, when food was prepared and divided giving priority to the leaders (in a hierarchy of leadership) and the women that prepared the food. The majority of the children present at the event stayed without eating, the few that ate did so because their mothers who cooked the food gave them food. These were children with extreme vulnerability due to poverty in which they walk kilometres and kilometres in the sun without access to water and on this Sunday, a day of religious ceremonies, many of them had come from two days under these conditions. [Despite being invited to eat with the leaders], the JA! team withdrew and quietly went and prepared and ate food apart from the larger group because they felt ashamed about such differentiation and in our perspective injustice in the [local] priorities in the sharing of food in front of the starving children and old people who just watched. Not that it is for JA! nor any external element invited into these communities, where they enjoy their goodwill and readiness to r­eceive us, to then create conflicts that go against all of their cultural habits … This experience served to make us more attentive to these issues, so that future events involving any type of benefit, whether food or other products, we would make sure that such benefits would be shared in a more just manner that benefits the children and the elderly. This approach will have to deal with the traditional leadership hierarchy, so that they also share the approach … If we were only there for the project we would never have allowed that to happen. We also believe that the food was enough to share with more people.

The issue of sharing, hierarchy and proper protection infiltrates

nelson  |   149 this honest account of shame and frustration. JA! members’ reading of the situation reflects the fact that their encounters with residents of this community were primarily through brief formal meetings with local leadership and the forest concession association members, an administered survey conducted in various homes and brief community education and training sessions. For example, what many outsiders, such as environmentalists living in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, do not easily observe is the fact that the children that they mention have extended kin and family in different sections of the community area. Based on my extended observa­tions as I spent time with different families, while many children do not obtain much food during their long walks from their homes to distant religious ceremonies, and while many children are in fact undernourished and likely dehydrated at various times of the day and throughout the year, they can and do ask politely for a cup of water, from homes along the road, and they are frequently given this water, knowing that the favour will be returned when the extended family travels to their area. These children also snack on woodland foods (such as insects and fruits) in their travels through the community. Most children have strong kinship networks that provide these benefits, and others are indeed highly vulnerable owing to a lack of such networks and rely on their child friends to share what they obtain from their stronger networks. Yes, they did not benefit from what was initially enough food to go around for all attendees of the event, but it would also be a stretch to flatly portray them as ‘starving’ and as receiving no assistance from fellow community members within their circles of friends and within their extended lineages. Additionally, the women who prepared the food for the abovementioned event have no kinship ties to me. There is no reason why they should labour all afternoon to cook food for people, many of whom are not in their kin/family. They consider their labour as requiring some form of payment, and the ability to ‘see the movie’ was not a compelling enough incentive to compensate for this labour. They saw privileged access to choice portions of meat as a key motivator for cooking the meal, despite knowing that the film event was ‘for the community’. The fight that ensued over dividing the food among local leaders and the women who cooked the food (and their children) resulted in one leader having to step in and impose his authority in an effort to please the members of JA! who had refused to eat and

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returned to their campsite. This leader suddenly found himself imposing a way of ‘sharing’ that generated new conflicts with many women and which still left JA! members very upset, because so many other children from neighbouring communities never received any food. These narratives demonstrate how victims (unpaid log haulers), thieves (logging bosses and ‘bad local leaders’) and heroes (­ forest protectors and reformed leaders who learn to share) are made through encounters across difference that shape deep mistrust among those involved. The ‘community’ is the unit of involvement of the government and development interventions (this works differently in the structure of the Church). But this is not a unit that drives the majority of relationships in the forest. Kinship relationships are not simply static relics of tradition or the result of ‘isolation’ or ‘habits’, as indicated in the narrative above. These relationships are dynamic and they are what will make or break a forest project, an illegal logger’s access to a prized grove of trees or any other type of intervention (see similar examples in Nightingale, this volume). The issue goes much deeper than ‘good leaders who share’ versus ‘corrupt leaders who pocket the proceeds of illegal logs’, or who direct the distribution of choice portions of meat at special events. My critical discussion of the discourse surrounding proper leadership and protection practices is not meant to be an attack on these projects, as they have already influenced the lives and the local politics on the ground in these places. They are part of these forest spaces now and are already an outcome of intensive local, national and international intervention. Rather than reading this landscape and set of projects as failures to achieve the original vision of environmental intervention or to achieve adequate sharing or governance, they should be understood as a set of political, social and ecological relationships that are still in the making and whose outcome cannot be designed by any one person or organization, but is partly shaped by narratives of victimhood, thieving and heroic leadership and protection practices. Concluding thoughts In describing moments when different actors become, make and unmake hero figures in the woodlands of Zambézia, and through my reading of and interpretation of diverse texts and encounters with people – ranging from the logging boss Simão, to José, to inter­ national journalists and donors, to forestry project directors, to local

nelson  |   151 forest association members such as Agostinho Pequenino (e.g. forest heroes), to Mozambican environmental activists and local leaders – I found these actors expressing clear ideologies as they performed their complex roles. In temporarily setting aside these ideologies and categories for the purpose of analysing practice, it is possible to examine a shift from the making of ‘great white saviour’ heroes towards transforming a more ‘localized’ set of victims and thieves into hero figures. These include Simão saving communities in his ‘homeland’, José becoming a wage-earning man hauling timber with his neighbours, Pequenino transforming leaders into forest protectors and a local leader redistributing food to hungry children in front of environmentalists. What effects does this shift have in the forest and in the ways we understand woodland landscapes and political ecologies and activism? I see similarities in the making of forest heroes with what ­Andrea Nightingale (this volume) observes as the making of ‘resilient’ communities and ‘local’-level knowledge into flat notions of scale. ­ Neoliberal development interventions and activist and scholarly res­ ponses that question them tend to fall into similar patterns of analysis that attempt to understand and locate specific ideologies and objects of inquiry and strategic intervention. What receives less attention is how ways of thinking about and making victims, thieves and heroes are repeated through new or different bodies and landscapes in the making. Feminist political ecologists who engage in academic, activist, home-space and other realms also contribute to making new heroes in the different contexts in which they live and work among collectives or coalitions and specific movement leaders that gain varying levels of notoriety. How will FPE as a process shift these practices in the future and in their collaborative encounters in the classroom and beyond? I continue to struggle with this question as I participate in and observe my friends, family, colleagues and students continuing practices of becoming and making new heroes in the USA and within and beyond the woodlands of Zambézia. Notes 1  According to ‘Table 19. Resident population by race and state: 2010’ in the 2012 Statistical Abstract of the United States, US Census Bureau, Washington, DC, pp. 24–5, www.census.

gov/prod/2011pubs/12statab/pop.pdf, accessed 18 July 2014. 2  The UVM Office of Institutional Research indicates that the proportion of graduates who enrolled in study

152   |  four abroad for at least one semester during their undergraduate enrolment was 17.7 per cent for 2011/12 graduates, 18.8 per cent for 2012/3 graduates and 16.4 per cent for 2013/14 graduates (personal email communication). 3  The Mozambican Liberation Front struggled for independence as a ­guerrilla resistance group and then from 1975 onward it became the sole party constructing an independent socialist state, until civil war and an eventual peace treaty in 1992 trans­ formed ­Mozambique into a multiparty democratic state. In October 2013, Afonso Dhlakama of the Renamo party declared the peace treaty cancelled and armed attacks by government forces and formerly demobilized Renamo soldiers are ongoing in the central areas of the country. 4  Capulanas are patterned lengths of cloth with complex political, historical and cultural ‘lives’ (see Polanah 1981). Their practical uses and symbolic meanings include their role as a skirt, a required object in lobolo ceremonies, in dances and political marches, as an obligatory provision by a husband and in day-to-day use as a baby sling, purse, blanket, bag, etc. 5  National Organization of Mozam­ bican Women. 6  I use pseudonyms for all those engaged in logging activity. 7  Lila Abu-Lughod argues in her book Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (2013) that feminists should ‘trouble’ the saviour narratives mirroring the ‘Chris­ tian’ salvation deployed during colonial and imperial conquest. 8  I know this through translator confirmation and observations. 9  Ethnography carries power-laden dynamics, assumptions and positionali­ ties (see Stacey 1988; Visweswaran 1994; and Lassiter 2005). 10  A previous and nearly identical

version of this encounter with José ap­ pears in Nelson (2012). 11  In Mozambique, the term furtivo refers to one who coordinates illegal timber harvesting (typically Mozambican lower-level actors in the commodity-chain hierarchy as compared to predominantly Chinese timber buyers based in major cities and ports) (see Mackenzie and Ribeiro 2009: 12). 12  I detail these conversations and activities in Nelson (2012, 2013b). 13  See landmine-detecting ‘Hero­ RATs’ in Mozambique: www.apopo.org/ en/adopt. 14  Several of the examples detailed in this section also appear in my unpub­ lished dissertation and were previously published in a more accessible format in Maputo in Portuguese in a series of publicly released essays with a preface by the director of Justiça Ambiental (see Nelson 2013a, b and c). 15  There are lively debates in local Mozambican newspapers countering the outcry against Chinese logging bosses by the now defunct coalition Amigas da Floresta (Friends of the Forest). One commentator expressed criticism of ‘Western’ China-blaming, arguing that the West is fearful of losing its own coercive control in the region and that foreign researchers investigating the logging are proof of that fear (see the comment entitled ‘Amigos do barulho’ (Friends of noise) in the newspaper Domingo, 4 March 2007). 16  My translation of the meeting transcript in Portuguese. 17  The plural term ‘os fiscais’ in Moz­ ambique refers generally to a particular type of police who can assess fines or enforce tax payments and proper docu­ mentation (this is different from transit police, customs officials and police that work out of formal police stations). In rural communities the term refers to those who have a basic training and

nelson  |   153 certification in a subset of laws (such as the 1997 Land Law and the 1999 Forest and Wildlife Law) to the extent that they may approach violators of these laws, prohibit further illegal activity and report violators to the district police, the district-level judicial system or those who can assess fines in the District Services of Economic Affairs (SDAE). Many of these rural and local-level fiscais are from the communities where their new training allows them to police and monitor. 18  Note: the implications of this for the perpetuation of misogyny are complex. I am not arguing for environ­ mentalists to promote projects enabling men to bash women. I am asking them to recognize these dynamics as a central feature in the socio-political-ecological landscape that could change through time, but which currently shapes gendered identity formation and power dynamics for those who carry timber.

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154   |  four Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transna­ tionalism, 3(1): 250–77. Disney, J. L. (2008) Women’s Activism and Feminist Agency in Mozambique and Nicaragua, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Ferguson, A. (2000) ‘Resisting the veil of privilege: building bridge identities as an ethico-politics of global feminism’, in U. Narayan and S. Harding (eds), Decentering the Center: Philosophy for a multicultural, postcolonial, and feminist world, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 189–207. Foucault, M. (2007) Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, New York: Picador. Haraway, D (1985) ‘Teddy bear patri­ archy: taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–1936’, Social Text, 11: 20–64. Harding, S. G. (ed.) (2004) The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and political controversies, New York: Routledge. Heron, B. (2007) Desire for Development: Whiteness, Gender, and the Helping Imperative, Waterloo, Ontario: Wil­ fred Laurier University Press. hooks, b. (1989/1992) ‘Representing whiteness in the black imagination’, in L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and P. A. Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge, pp. 338–46. Kosek, J. (2004) ‘Purity and pollution: racial degradation and environmen­ tal anxieties’, in R. Peet and M. Watts (eds), Liberation Ecologies: Environ­ ment, development, social movements, 2nd edn, London: Routledge, pp. 125–65. — (2006) Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lassiter, L. E. (2005) The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography, Chi­ cago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Leach, M. (2007) ‘Earth Mother myths

and other ecofeminist fables: how a strategic notion rose and fell’, Devel­ opment and Change, 38(1): 67–85. Mackenzie, C. and D. Ribeiro (2009) Tris­ tezas Tropicais: More Sad Stories from the Forests of Zambézia, Maputo: Justiça Ambiental (JA!) and ORAM. Matusse, R. and J. Malique (2008) Josina Machel: Icone da Emancipação da Mulher Mocambicana, Coleção Embondeiro 29, Maputo. McClintock, A. (1995) Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Col­ onial Contest, New York: Routledge. McEwan, C. (2003) ‘The West and other feminisms’, in K. Anderson, M. ­Domosh, S. Pile et al. (eds), Hand­ book of Cultural Geography, London: Sage, pp. 405–19. Mohanty, C. T. (1984) ‘Under Western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses’, in C. T. Mohanty, A. Russo and L. Torres (eds), Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 51–80. — (1991) ‘Cartographies of struggle: Third World women and the politics of feminism’, in C. T. Mohanty, A. Russo and L. Torres (eds), Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 1–47. Mollett, S. and C. Faria (2013) ‘Messing with gender in feminist political ecology’, Geoforum, 45(1): 116–25. Moore, N. (2008) ‘The rise and rise of ecofeminism as a development fable: a response to Melissa Leach’s “Earth Mothers and other ecofeminist fables: how a strategic notion rose and fell”’, Development and Change, 39(3): 461–75. Narayan, U. (1997) Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third-World Feminism, New York: Routledge. — (1998) ‘Essence of culture and a sense of history: a feminist critique

nelson  |   155 of cultural essentialism’, Hypatia, 13(2): 86–106. Narayan, U. and S. Harding (2000) Decentering the Center: Philosophy for a multicultural, post-colonial, and feminist world. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nelson, I. L. (2012) ‘A feminist political ecology of livelihoods and activism in the Miombo woodlands of Zam­ bézia, Mozambique’, Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Oregon, Eugene. — (2013a) ‘The social side of logging in the Miombo woodlands in Zambézia, Mozambique’ [O lado social do corte de madeira nos bosques de Miombo, na Zambézia, Mozambique], Maputo: Justiça Ambiental. — (2013b) ‘Fear and becoming “fiscais”: monitoring/policing community forest concessions in Zambézia, Mo­ zambique’ [O medo e o tornarmo-nos fiscais: monitorar concessões florestais comunitárias na Zambézia, Moçambique], Maputo: Justiça Ambi­ ental. — (2013c) ‘Creating partnerships with people and forests in the Miombo woodlands in Zambézia’ [Criando parcerias com pessoas e florestas nos bosques de Miombo, na Zam­ bézia, Moçambique], Maputo: Justiça Ambiental. Nightingale, A. (2003) ‘A feminist in the forest: situated knowledges and mixing methods in natural resource management’, ACME: An Internation­ al E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 2(1): 77–90. Onion, The (2014) ‘6-day visit to rural African village completely changes woman’s Facebook profile picture’, News in Brief section, 28 January, www.theonion.com/articles/6dayvisit-to-rural-african-villagecompletely-cha,35083/, accessed 14 February 2014.

Paulson, S. (2013) Masculinidades en Mov­ imiento: Transformación Territorial y Sistemas de Género [Territories and masculinities in movement. Gender systems in Latin America], Buenos Aires: TESEO. Polanah, L. (1981) The Saga of a Cotton Capulana [História de uma capulana de algodão], Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Rocheleau, D. E. (1995) ‘Maps, numbers, text, and context: mixing methods in feminist political ecology’, P ­ rofessional Geographer, 47(4): 458–66. Said, E. W. (1978) Orientalism, New York: Pantheon. — (1981) Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World, New York: Pantheon. SAIH (Studentenes Og Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond) (2012) Africa for Norway (Radi-Aid), Music by Wathiq Hoosain, lyrics by Bretton Woods, video by Ikind Productions, www.africafornorway.no/, accessed 20 July 2014. Spivak, G. C. (1990) The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dia­ logues, New York: Routledge. Stacey, J. (1988) ‘Can there be a feminist ethnography?’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 11(1): 21–7. Stoler, A. L. (1995) Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexual­ ity and the Colonial Order of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. — (2002) Carnal Knowledge and Impe­ rial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, Berkeley: University of California Press. Tsing, A. L. (2005) Friction: An Ethnogra­ phy of Global Connection, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Urdang, S. (1989) And Still They Dance: Women, war, and the struggle for change in Mozambique, London: Earthscan.

156   |  four US Census Bureau (2012) Statistical Abstract of the United States, ­Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, www.census.gov/prod/ 2011pubs/12statab/pop.pdf, accessed 18 July 2014. Visweswaran, K. (1994) Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wainaina, B. (2005) ‘How to write about Africa. Some tips: sunsets and starvation are good’, Granta 92, www.

granta.com/Archive/92/How-toWrite-about-Africa/Page-1, accessed 18 July 2014. Young, I. M. (2003) ‘The logic of mascu­ linist protection: reflections on the current security state’, Signs, 29(1): 1–25. Zwick, D., S. K. Bonsu and A. Darmody (2008) ‘Putting consumers to work. Co-creation and new marketing govern-mentality’, Journal of Con­ sumer Culture, 8(2): 163–96.

5 | HEGEMONIC WATERS AND RETHINKING NATURES OTHERWISE

Leila M. Harris

Introduction: lived ecologies and enlivened feminist political ecologies This image was taken while I was conducting fieldwork in rural areas in south-eastern Turkey in 2001. In some ways, the image is unremarkable. Women all over the world access water for domestic needs – it is common to see images of women carrying water on their heads or shoulders, at times for long distances. However, this

5.1  Towards a lived feminist political ecology approach: a woman in southeastern Turkey accesses water from an irrigation canalet for home use’ (photograph by the author)

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image is noteworthy in that it shows the massive infrastructure and technology made available for irrigation in this region (the Harran plain of the south-eastern Anatolia region), while underlining that access to water for other daily needs may remain out of reach. According to planners and engineers who have worked to build this infrastructure and are familiar with the water quality in the canalets (small canals), the water is not safe to drink, and is not meant for drinking or other domestic uses. The fact that the woman pictured is nonetheless using this water for domestic needs highlights tensions between state-led developmental priorities and everyday lived real­ ities. In this case, water for productive purposes is a clear priority. While planners understand that households require water for washing, drinking and spiritual uses, engineers and other planners assume that people will find other water for those purposes, and that people would not attempt to use the unsafe canalet water.1 While this example is potentially illustrative of several broad concerns of interest for environment and development, here I am most interested in what the situation highlights regarding key debates and ways forward in feminist political ecology (FPE). In particular, I would like to consider the potential of an FPE approach that considers the everyday, embodied and emotional relations to resources and ‘natures’. Viewing this situation from such a perspective – foregrounding the 3 ‘E’s – highlights the different needs, values and potential uses of water as well as the daily practices that might result in someone accessing unsafe water for domestic uses. At a more general level, feminist political ecology perspectives also bring into view the tensions and impossibilities involved with those approaches to water governance that have become ‘hegemonic’ at present (Sneddon 2013) – particularly those that privilege productive, market-oriented water needs and uses (often referred to as ‘neoliberal’). In this chapter, I explore some of these tensions and consider how we might rethink our relations to complex natures ‘otherwise’ by building on feminist, decolonial/post-colonial and allied approaches (see discussions in Walsh and others, this volume). The approach I offer here might be understood as an extended ‘livelihoods’ or ‘lived feminist political ecology’ approach, attentive to everyday needs, embodied interactions and labours as well as emotional and affective relations with the environments and natures where we live. As such, I do not wish to build on livelihood approaches that are construed narrowly as focused on economic needs

harris  |   159 and income as paramount. Instead, I work deliberately to move away from a perspective that might privilege production (e.g. irrigation uses of water), and instead highlight what a focus on everyday inter­actions and embodiments enables for thinking about our relations and investments with water and natures – broadly understood. I revisit and unpack some of these insights and tensions foregrounded by a lived or extended FPE approach centred on the 3 Es (everyday, embodied, emotions) in the pages that follow. My target is to consider what this offers to political ecology or nature studies more generally, as well as how such an approach might be meaningful given the context of current hegemonies related to the marketization of water in particular. I begin with a discussion of hegemony of contemporary approaches to water, highlighting economistic approaches to nature as central to neoliberal, marketized and indeed many livelihood approaches. I then provide an overview of key concepts and insights from feminist, decolonial and post-colonial thought that serve to enliven what a lived feminist political ecological approach might look like. To this end, I offer examples from the work of colleagues and from my own work to bring particular attention to the emotional, affective, embodied and relational aspects of socio-natures – offering these as key ways forward for feminist political ecology, nature-cultures and human-nature studies more broadly. Neoliberalization of nature, and working towards counterhegemonies To be able to counter hegemonic trends, one has to be able to imagine and articulate alternatives. The very concept of hegemony, following Gramsci (1971/1997), includes the sense that certain ideas or constructs become so normative, so taken for granted, that there is general acceptance – even among those who one might expect to be opposed (for livelihood, identity or other reasons). In lay terms, an idea or practice is ‘hegemonic’ when it is so normalized that there does not appear to be any alternative – it is simply the way it is. As commentators have noted, there is a key imperative to be able to imagine and articulate alternatives in order to work outside or beyond hegemonic thinking and practice (Ferguson 2010). Given the very definition of hegemony in making it seem as if there are no alternatives, this can be a particularly difficult enterprise. The work of Chris Sneddon is instructive as a starting point for

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considering current hegemonies in the water realm – including notions of water scarcity, as well as common use of market instruments and logics. As Sneddon (2013) explores, over the past several decades we have seen a clear shift and entrenchment to certain market-based practices. These include full cost recovery for services, a privileging of ‘efficiency’ in policy decisions, as well as privatization of water services (see Harris 2013a for an overview specific to water marketization, and Bakker 2010 for a discussion of privatization in particular). Apart from recognizing these practices as increasingly common, a focus on hegemony also invites attention to how and why it is that these ideas and practices have become accepted, taken for granted and naturalized to the extent that even those whose interests might not be served by those approaches tend to accept and even validate those practices. While a comprehensive explanation is likely not possible, it is clear that hegemonies in the water realm are often achieved with the help of institutions such as the World Water Council, the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (see work by Goldman 2007, 2005, as key examples, also discussed in Harris 2013b). My contribution here picks up on other recent work that queries these neoliberal and market-based policies from a feminist perspective (Harris 2009). Feminism on the whole, even with many variants and its own tensions, is largely a project about exposing and questioning particular hegemonies, whether those associated with masculinism, sexism, patriarchy or increasingly other intersectional forms of difference and inequality (e.g. race, class and sexuality). As suggested by Ahlers and Zwarteveen (2009), feminist perspectives are particularly meaningful in deciphering things that otherwise might remain hidden within mainstream neoliberal policies that make invisible and naturalize particular modes of allocation of key resources (such as water). Taking up this insight, I suggest that feminist political ecology is a fruitful starting point for prying open possibilities for challenging particular hegemonies of thought and practice in the environmental governance realm. My goal here is precisely to interrogate what cracks, fissures and new possibilities arise from querying these policies and practices from a feminist and decolonial/post-colonial perspective. To do so, it is imperative to also draw on an extended and revised understanding of feminism and FPE that takes intersectionality seriously, including the politics of North–South and anti-racism, as well as decoloniality (Mollett and Faria 2012; Harris 2008; Nightingale 2011). Specific

harris  |   161 questions I consider include: how might FPE learn from other feminist, decolonial and post-colonial perspectives to illuminate features and aspects of current environmental policies and practices that could be ‘otherwise’? Apart from enabling a perspective that takes inequality and difference seriously, even considers them paramount, what else might be exposed by such a perspective? More conceptually, how might we go about the difficult work of beginning to expose the hegemonic logics and foreclosures of specific environmental and nature–society practices? By referring to marketized practices as ‘hegemonic’ and to some extent naturalized or ‘accepted’, I do not at all suggest that these practices have not been subject to deep contestation. Clearly, these issues have been central concerns for water justice movements, and for broader struggles of equity, food and water security, or indigenous rights (key examples include resistance in Bolivia – Bustamante 2004 – and throughout Latin America – Harris and Roa 2013). Nonetheless, it is clear that in some respects these practices have been generally accepted and promoted in many policy realms – again, the above citations related to water governance hegemonies and roles of international financial institutions (IFIs) offer clear evidence of this. As one example, consider the 1997 report published by the World Bank group, ‘Getting the private sector involved in water – what to do in the poorest of countries’. Mentioning a litany of problems in these contexts, from lack of government credibility, to high leakage rates, underpriced water and unsuccessful subsidy schemes, the report goes on to discuss how to make private sector involvement more attractive in impoverished contexts – the contexts that the report suggests are ‘most in need’ of that involvement. Offering a stepwise approach, the report suggests measures to be taken to reduce costs and increase the attractiveness of contracting in those countries (the goal of the report and the steps to be taken is clearly to entice private involvement – extending and improving service are implied and assumed benefits of the privatization approach). Similar endorsements are easy to find elsewhere. For instance, following on from the Johannesburg summit in 2002, the final report stated succinctly: ‘water privatization is the best policy to tackle the global South’s poverty and water delivery problems’ (cited in Goldman 2007: 787). With such a policy focus, some have estimated that private water delivery in the global South could rise quickly, from an estimated 400 million consumers in 2000 to as many as 1.2 billion in 2015 (ibid.: 786).

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Turning to the imperative to think through and articulate alternatives in such moments, Ferguson (2010) suggests that there is considerable attention in the literature on what is wrong with ‘neoliberal’ approaches (i.e. there is sufficient critique and suggestion about what progressive and equity-oriented scholars and practitioners do not like about these policies). Yet, he argues, what we need is to offer more on what we would like to see in their place – what are the alternatives that we should, or must, consider? This interest in alternatives has been a central concern in recent debates related to post-neoliberalism – much of this discussion building on indigenous politics and countermovements to offer challenges to the norm­ative bases of many mainstream developmentalist or market-oriented approaches. As just several examples, consider work on alternative and community-based economies (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013), the recent decolonial movements across Latin America (see Walsh, this volume), or the constitutional reforms that have swept the region and transformed regulatory and policy bases for water management (e.g. in Bolivia, Ecuador or Uruguay – Harris and Roa 2013). As Goodale and Postero (2013) lay out with respect to their investigation of the politics of neoliberalism in contemporary Latin America, a focus on everyday lives of people and institutions serves as a useful lever to question and challenge broader meanings and operations of neoliberalism. Here, we can see clear points of departure for the ongoing and unfinished work of exposing the possibilities that counter, and operate outside of or beyond, ‘neoliberal’ forms. The next section explores FPE as a fulcrum in such efforts. FPE as a critical intellectual-political site to think through ‘alternatives’ As noted briefly above, indigenous politics and decolonializing movements have already proved to be central to political and conceptual movements aimed at building alternatives to neoliberalism (or ‘post-neoliberalism’; e.g. Escobar 2010; Yates and Bakker 2014; Goodale and Postero 2013; De Frietas et al. forthcoming). Feminist thought and politics have frequently been allied with these movements (for instance, as discussed in Cusicanqui and Geidel 2010 for the case of Bolivia). Yet there is also a clear need to build on these intersections, and to think through a politics of alliance that also considers ways that

harris  |   163 feminist politics and praxis are in some respects very central to these projects, particularly with regard to theorizing and living ‘otherwise’ (see Wichterich, Chapter 2, this volume). As suggested by Escobar, the project of thinking otherwise from a Latin American modernity/ coloniality perspective faces several key tensions and open-ended questions. In particular, he suggests that there are at least three areas of focus that have remained largely outside of this intellectual and political project – requiring more careful engagement and focus. He writes, ‘The first, and perhaps most pressing, is gender; the second nature and the environment; the third the need to construct new economic imaginaries capable of supporting concrete struggles against neo-liberalism and designs for alternative economies’ (2003: 12, emphasis added). These are precisely the tasks taken up by several of the contributions in this volume, including the present chapter. Beyond this groundwork laid by Latin American thinkers and political movements, we can also consider the work of Gibson-Graham, Vandana Shiva and other feminists and critical thinkers as offering ways forward to think beyond hegemonic economic understandings (e.g. such as capital-C Capitalism – Gibson-Graham 1996 – or rethinking the commons – Shiva 2002), as well as the larger body of work that challenges neoliberal policies and understandings through a focus on consequences for equity, for women or for socio-ecological sustainability (e.g. Eschle 2004; Peterson 2003; Duggan 2003; Lind 2002; Rankin 2001; Ahlers and Zwarteveen 2009). Even with the clear resonances between decolonizing and postneoliberal projects, these themes have not yet been taken up adequately as part of the feminist political ecological project and toolkit. It seems that a key task is to think through how these intellectual and political resources might be mobilized more effectively, and collaboratively. In particular, in concert with the approach of this volume on the whole, how might we work to theorize and articulate alternatives to neoliberalism through enhanced attention to embodied, affective and everyday lived dimensions of our relations to nature (or what I refer to somewhat differently here as the 3 Es: everyday, embodied and emotional)? I do not offer an overview of what FPE has done effectively, since this is covered in the introduction to this volume and elsewhere (Mollett and Faria 2012; Hawkins and Ojeda 2011; Resurreccion and Elmhirst 2008). Instead, I turn to an exploration of FPE and thinking ‘otherwise’, with particular focus on the challenge

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of exposing fissures and articulating alternatives to neoliberalized environmental governance. I suggest that there are at least four things a 3E-expanded FPE approach helps to lay bare, providing starting points to deepen our engagement with these questions. Specifically, FPE potentially challenges assumptions about efficiency/productivity and instead accents women’s and others’ experiences, livelihoods, basic needs and gender-sensitive approaches. As such, FPE propels an alternative sensibility of what matters, shifting away from market-based and capitalist logics of value that are often problematic from gender or equity perspectives. FPE also has the potential to challenge the privileging of certain scales of analysis and interactions. In particular, FPE helps to offer a counterweight to scales and interactions often central to hegemonies of neoliberal water governance. Here we might highlight the importance of the everyday, embodied and local scales of interaction (with a focus on community, household and scales of the body), as needed correctives to governance scales and priorities that might focus on the logics of statist or global/transnational interests (e.g. trade, or state power). As well, as argued by Nightingale (this volume), FPE can help to offer nuanced approaches to scale and place that serve to unpack and interrogate assumptions about the ‘local’ or how the ‘local’ scale may be enrolled in different technological or statist projects. With analytical and political focus on identity, difference and inequality, FPE also offers a key lens through which to expose the ways that certain populations are not well served by hegemonies of neo­ liberal environmental governance; indeed, these logics and approaches may actively maintain power hierarchies and associated processes of marginalization. Again, evidence of such retrenched marginalization has served as a key basis for resistance movements in multiple contexts. Examples are Latin American movements in relation to water, or seed resistance and biopiracy movements in India (Shiva 1999). Through attention to inequality and difference (in many ways the bread and butter of political ecology in general, and FPE in particular), work along these lines is important to expose the fissures, gaps and in­equities that are propelled through neoliberal environmental governance. Finally, with more recent intellectual and political emphasis on affect, emotion and embodied experience, extended FPE approaches also have the potential to bring to the fore artistic and emotional responses to various ‘crises’ of environmental governance. While the

harris  |   165 potential in this regard is vast and relatively little explored, I offer several examples as key starting points, including the example of creative critical empathy to ‘rethink rivers’ (building on the work of author and artist Merlinda Bobis and the emphasis of a recent network focused on creative critical empathy housed in the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia). I examine each of these dimensions, with examples, in the sections that follow.

Efficiency, productivity and misguided logics of resource provision and access  Among the important conceptual issues related to hegemonic environmental governance, it is often the case that growth, efficiency and payment for services are considered paramount goals that inform how governance proceeds. For instance, the move to privatize water provision is often based on the idea that doing so will be more effi­ cient. In particular, bringing market logics to service provision for water or other basic services, private companies are also thought to be more adept at billing customers and collecting payment (with the aim of reducing non-revenue water and increasing the financial resources available to the utility, for instance). In terms of broader efficiency and conservation goals as well, the idea is that rather than wasting water for thirsty crops in dry regions, the ‘market’ will redirect scarce  water to more efficient uses, therefore rectifying problems of misallocation and waste. For instance, a water-intense crop such as cotton will be grown only if it makes market sense, and if, on balance, the payments required for water inputs will reap profits given the price paid for cotton on regional or global markets. As such, the market will adjust what is grown where in ways that are more efficient, more in line with the comparative advantage of a particular locale, and in step with variable biophysical conditions (e.g. this would likely result in water-intensive crops not being grown in arid regions, unless the price is high enough to compel this to occur). As Zwarteveen (1998), Peterson (2003, 2005) and others have cautioned, however, logics of efficiency and productivity risk sidelining non-productive uses, such as those associated with reproductive econ­ omies and household needs. A feminist perspective helps to expose this disconnect and the biases therein. In particular, from a feminist perspective, there is a concern that cash crops or other ‘productive’ uses of water might take precedence over household needs (or indeed

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‘basic’ needs of drinking, washing, bathing, and so forth). Further, the general assumption of ‘efficiency’ and the idea that resources should be allocated based on the highest market value accentuates the fundamental difficulty of capturing non-market values of water, whether these be health benefits, poverty reduction, or links to cultural or spiritual values. In line with Zwarteveen’s (1998) caution that the focus on allocating water to its highest market value may undermine benefits of water derived by women, or lessen prioritization of other uses (e.g. domestic, spiritual), recall the introductory vignette from my own work in south-eastern Turkey. As that example highlights, some communities had access to water for irrigation uses (largely for growing cotton as a primary cash crop), but did not necessarily have sufficient water for bathing, washing laundry and dishes or other household uses (see Figure 5.1). As well, women in the region frequently complained that the irrigation schedule was determined by the cropping needs of cotton, but not of their household vegetable plots, which they used to meet household dietary needs (indeed, several women suggested that they would be able to maintain their garden plots a month longer into the autumn, but the plants would die as soon as water was no longer made available at the end of the cotton-growing season). Considering these issues with a broadened focus on water policy and governance debates of the past several decades, it has been noted that even as the Dublin principles for water from 1992 emphasized economic value for water in a way that was also attentive to many social issues, for instance, with strong emphasis on participatory approaches and the recognition and inclusion of women as water ­ users and managers (Ahlers 2002), the practice of the past two decades has been to increasingly reduce these principles in a narrow sense to market value (and further still, the notion of an economic value of water has often been bundled with imperatives to promote privatization schema – Harris 2013a). Here, we see the resonance of broader feminist debates related to the ‘value’ of reproductive labour and unpaid work, and how this is negotiated within a broader market sphere that assigns value only through considering elements of the market economy and waged labour (Waring 1988; Peterson 2005). Linked to these concerns, yet another issue highlighted by Zwarteveen (1998) relates to the linked assumptions about rational choice. In brief, an intersectional and feminist approach invites atten­

harris  |   167 tion to the ways that different individuals make decisions based not only on market rationality, but also on sociocultural context, or labour practices, such as one’s role as a caretaker, or broader senses of responsibility to community. Indeed, if we also consider the broader context and frequency of racialized and gendered violence, we might also more fundamentally question the biases inherent in assumptions of ‘choice’ – a questionable notion given sociocultural, institutional and colonial histories and practices that have often circumscribed options, particularly for certain populations (Razack 2000). Here, the FPE critique of marketized environmental governance links with the broader interest of this volume in specific nature-cultures, and how complex cultural dynamics are often at play in the ways that we differentially experience, understand and negotiate ‘natures’. As well, this critique also links directly to the fourth dimension detailed below – the potential for FPE to expose and even invite approaches to water governance based on embodied and affective dimensions, rather than approaches that foreground rationality, efficiency, productive uses and linked notions of economic value. In brief, these critiques and intellectual resources position FPE to more effectively articulate an approach to value and allocation of water (or other resources) in a way that is fundamentally ‘otherwise’ – posing a fundamental challenge to common ‘hegemonies’ in the water realm at present.

Shifting scales: renewed emphasis on the body, household or community and other counterweights  Yet another way that FPE offers an important leverage point to think through and articulate alternatives to current hegemonies is through focus on somewhat different scalar politics and negotiations. In particular, there is ample empirical evidence from the past several decades to suggest that given the reliance on market mechanisms, state or global scales may be implicitly privileged in governance schema. Consider, for instance, that ideas around ‘productive uses’ and ‘comparative advantage’ are very much part of the broader political economic tradition of trade theory from Ricardo onwards (Sheppard 2012; Sheppard and Leitner 2010). Here we can see a bias towards privileging ‘national’ scales for accounting of benefits of trade relations, without attention to the regional, community or even household scales that would allow us to understand how those benefits and costs may be distributed. Indeed, many of the resistance movements against privatization or corporatization of water have

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also been based on the idea that these policies favour transnational corporations at the expense of local livelihoods or cultural values related to water (Bakker 2013, 2010; Escobar 2010; Perreault 2005). Even the very fact that it is often the international financial institutions (e.g. the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund) which are pushing these policies forward, when even national governments may not be in favour (e.g. as in the case of Ghana’s water privatization – Amenga-Etego and Grusky 2005; Yeboah 2006) is suggestive of the ways that neoliberal environmental governance may serve particular global economic interests at the expense of statist or national priorities, let alone community or household interests (this is especially so when we consider that Northern interests are so much a part of the make-up of those institutions, given voting rules and so forth – e.g. Harris 2013a, 2013b; Goldman 2007). Countering the scalar politics and logics that arguably are ‘built into’ neoliberalized environmental governance (emphasis on state power, globalized trade or particular Northern interests) feminist work has long emphasized the value, indeed necessity, of foregrounding other scales of analysis and engagement: the body, the household or the community (Staeheli et al. 2004), though not ignoring connections to state or global scales (e.g. Aldama 2003). This is not to say that feminist approaches are solely focused on these scales, nor that other approaches are unable to highlight local and embodied scales of interactions (e.g. livelihood and political ecology approaches often engage multi-scalar analysis). Nor is this to suggest a romanticiza­ tion of community or the ‘local’ (Joseph 2002; Brosius et al. 2005). Nonetheless, feminists have long offered careful examination of the politics of scale, opening up ways to rethink the community, the household and the body – and to interrogate the complicated relations therein rather than holding those scales as unknowable or apolitical (Marston 1990; Agarwal 1988). As part of these broader discussions, these issues are also dealt with ably by Nightingale (this volume), to encourage greater nuance in understanding scales not only as ‘levels’ in a hierarchical sense, but also to think through the ways that knowledge is ‘scaled’, or to more clearly articulate the ­ nuanced relationships between different invocations of scale (e.g. local knowledge is certainly not limited to specific locales, and technocratic knowledges do often engage understandings of the ‘local’). By building on critical engagements with the politics of scale by

harris  |   169 authors such as Marston (2000) and Norman et al. (2013), we have several examples of ways that FPE might allow us to ‘think otherwise’ with respect to current assumptions and biases in environmental governance. As Marston states, much focus on capitalist production (and here we can consider neoliberalism as well) focuses on the role of the state, capital and labour as central interests. By paying attention to which scales are privileged in certain framings, we can see that other scales – the body, the household or of the community, which are often more central for social reproduction and livelihoods – bring other realities and possibilities to light. It is precisely in this way that FPE holds considerable potential to broaden the interests privileged in neoliberalized environmental governance, as well as to rethink those scales and relations that are so frequently marginalized in such relations. FPE (building on broader allied approaches) instead invites fuller consideration of lived and everyday scales of these negotiations and what meanings people attach to them, as well as the ways that everyday modes of access of household dynamics might also shift with broad-scale economic changes, or even altered cropping patterns (see Carney 1993; Harris 2006; Rocheleau et al. 1996; Schroeder 1999; Loftus 2012, for examples of work along these lines). To give an example: earlier work in Turkey has shown the ways that even as justification of damming and diversion of the Tigris and Euphrates is often articulated on national scales, invocations of the household (indeed of gender relations) and the ‘basin’ are often pulled in strategically to justify those projects. However, at other times, the local implications of the project, or ‘basin-wide’ scale frames, are discounted as being inappropriate for decision-making regarding ‘national’ resources, such as water (Harris 2006, 2008; Harris and Alatout 2010). As early work by Agarwal (1988) demonstrates, it is also key to consider these scales not in isolation, but as interdependent with other scales – e.g. how are women or households affected by state policies or how might changing scales of the local be articulated against changing notions of the global? Returning to Nightingale (this volume), we can also work to disentangle invocation of scales as a politics of place, and of knowledge, including considering how ‘the local’, the ‘community’ or the ‘body’ figure in interventions or associated knowledge production. The final point in the section that follows on emotion, affect and embodiment provides yet another way

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to think about changing politics of scale. Bringing everyday embodied experiences of changing natures into view offers a way to consider households, and experience of individuals, but also may open possibilities to think more carefully about the emotional and affective lives of nature–society interactions.

Focus on identity/difference/inequality  Very much in line with the previous two sections, FPE also offers critical leverage and analy­ tical engagement to open up, and challenge, neoliberal environmental governance precisely by focusing on marginalized populations and experiences. These are precisely the populations and priorities that are so often left out of hegemonic governance policies and prescriptions. Feminist work has long foregrounded key operations of difference, inequality and power (e.g. Resurreccion and Elmhirst 2008; Truelove 2011). Over the last several decades, there has also been an increasing emphasis on highlighting intersectionality – not only thinking through gender difference, but also critical notions of race, class, caste, impoverishment, livelihoods and so forth (Harris 2008; Nightingale 2011; Mollett and Faria 2012). The claim here is relatively straightforward. By highlighting the experiences of those populations most likely to be sidelined with economistic and market-based approaches we can most easily consider the cracks, fissures and gaps in those approaches. Indeed, resistance movements of the past several decades have gained considerable momentum by highlighting inequality and difference, and in particular the experience of the poor, or of indigenous and other historically marginalized populations. Documenting and building on these experiences has been especially critical in resisting ongoing neoliberalization, such as policies that have favoured mining or transnational interests at the expense of these populations (Walsh 2012). Building on the first point above – the suggestion that FPE reorients what matters and where our focus and priorities should be (for instance, perhaps away from efficiency, and more towards universal access) – here the point is rather that particular attention to marginalized populations and inequalities is crucial to be able to speak to the necessary failures, gaps and fissures of ongoing neoliberalization. It is only by highlighting the situation of the most vulnerable or impoverished populations that we can better understand the many important effects of neoliberal water governance (Kabeer 1994).

harris  |   171 Just to provide several brief examples of where attention to inequality and difference has been at the forefront of resistance to neoliberalized water governance, witness: resistance to Coca-Cola water privatization in India (Parmar 2008), rejection of the role of TNCs in Cochabamba’s water supply (Bustamante 2004), or indigen­ ous mobilizations against mining in the Peruvian Andes (Bury 2005; Budds 2013), among numerous other examples. There is reason to pause, however, to question why it is that even as women have often been very active in many of these resistance movements, there is nonetheless relatively limited evidence of a strong role of feminist movements and theorizing in some of these efforts – indeed, at times there has been a disconnect between feminist and indigenous or other movements (see Walsh, this volume; Rousseau 2011). This speaks again to the importance of a broadened FPE approach that engages seriously with politics or race, inequality and colonialism. As thinkers such as Walsh and Rousseau have highlighted (and as also raised by Escobar, as noted in the introduction to this chapter), there is a clear imperative to more clearly articulate the role of feminist analytics, and organizing, in such resistance. Shiva’s work in India on seed saving and against biopiracy gives but one example of the ways that feminist movements and politics can, or perhaps even should, be foundational to forging alternatives to marketized environmental governance. As well, recall the critical work of Gibson-Graham (1996) in thinking through alternatives to capitalist engagements from a feminist perspective, or work by Walsh and others in thinking through the particular tensions and resonances in broader resistance efforts. A key task is to provide other examples of how these movements potentially come together, as well as to promote further conversation and thinking along these lines. In setting this out the need for closer engagement with decolonial and post-colonial theory and politics as a key touch-point for an enlivened FPE, I am hopeful that this might serve as an invitation to further thinking and engagement in this vein (see similar arguments offered in Walsh and Rocheleau, this volume, both of whom suggest the need for further rapprochement with decolonial and post-colonial politics and theorizing). The fact particularly that FPE (and political ecology more generally) has long had firm footing in the ‘third world’ and in a range of post-colonial contexts (broadly defined) makes this imperative even more apposite. However, as we tread this path there is an ongoing need for c­ aution

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– to critically evaluate what feminist theoretical, empirical and political resources might offer these engagements, and where they might usefully remain separate.

Affect, emotion and embodied experience Finally, as a fourth point to highlight as a way forward, recent work in FPE and across the humanities and social sciences more generally has highlighted issues of emotion, affect and embodied experience. This is a novel and promising avenue for further work. To provide just a few examples, Sultana (2011), working on the arsenic crisis in Bangladesh, highlights the feelings of sadness or shame that women experience when they are unable to access safe water for family needs. Goldin et al. (2008), working in the context of participatory water governance in southern Africa, focus on the shame, sadness or pride that might be connected to one’s participation in resource management. As well, Wutich and Ragsdale (2008) provide a quantitative analysis of water-related insec­ urity, demonstrating that communities in Bolivia (especially women) experience significant distress from social inequalities related to water access. These examples are particularly meaningful to show us that water and other resources are not only essential for livelihoods and bodily health, but in fact are important to broader dimensions of well-being and experience – including notions of exclusion and belonging. What these works highlight, building on the broader insights of FPE, is the importance of relative (in)access, or relative senses of knowledge and expertise, for one’s sense of self or sense of belonging in community. For instance, even if someone has access to water for bodily needs and basic household requirements, they may nonetheless attribute significant meaning to the fact that other communities or households enjoy easier or more consistent access to water, or more ready access to high-quality water. On this last point, work by Rodina (2013) in South Africa has shown the importance of relative differences in water and sanitation access in townships around Cape Town. In this example, even as shack dwellers technically have access to safe and affordable (indeed free) water for basic needs, the fact that they do not have in-home access to a private tap as their neighbours do has a significant impact on their sense of dignity, and of citizenship. I find work along these lines to be particularly inspiring – giving importance to the multiple meanings and senses that access to water may have for people, and moving beyond notions of minimal access

harris  |   173 in ways that are defined by bodily requirements and detached from the actual meanings of access. Instead, FPE offers the potential to highlight a broader embodied and emotional-affective sense of wellbeing, enabling consideration of the diverse meanings and experiences of water. This understanding is central to my current work, and to that of several of students at the University of British Columbia, particularly a group of us working on water access and participatory governance in South Africa and Ghana (EDGES 2014). Our goal is, in brief, to understand water access and governance in terms of the meanings that people attach to it, not just viewing water in a reductive sense in terms of basic access and requirements. We do so with particular attention to narratives of access, as well as to deriving a better understanding of connections to broader senses of well-being and socio-political processes – including senses of belonging and citizenship (see Morinville 2012; Rodina 2013; Peloso 2014; EDGES 2014). I have also been particularly inspired by other recent work that takes the role of emotions, affect and embodiment even farther. The work by author, playwright and performance artist Merlinda Bobis is particularly noteworthy. In her essay and novel Fish-Hair Woman (2012) and in her one-person play and performance River River, Bobis illumines the multiple meanings and embodied experiences we have with rivers and the other aspects of ‘nature’ that surround us. These are not merely utilitarian relations with the resources we ‘use’; rather, our relations with these more-than-human entities are complex and emotionally charged. In the example from her story and play, the relation of the fish-hair woman to the river that runs through her village is one of obligation, of violence, of longing and of loss. The river embodies pain, and this marks the very body of the female protagonist (in this case, her hair grows according to each death that occurred in her village during the civil war in the Philippines several decades ago). She is wrapped up with the violence; indeed, the hair on her head is a literal marker and outcome of the violence. She feels the pain each time her hair grows, and each time she is forced to go to the river to use her long and ever-growing hair to fish out the bodies that have been dumped in the water. Colleagues at the University of British Columbia have recently been building on this work, in collaboration with Bobis, to forge a Rethinking Rivers Network. The goals are ambitious – but at the same time

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fairly straightforward. In short, using the notion of ‘critical empathy’ or ‘creative critical empathy’ that Bobis and others have elaborated, the aim is to build on feminist and intersectional theorizing to forge and enable more complex and perhaps caring relationships with our rivers in ways that recognize the complexity of the emotional and affective ties we have to surrounding natures. Here, the recognition is that many of us experience a range of relationships and interactions with rivers (and other aspects of ‘natures’). As such, there is a need for new conceptual and artistic tools to capture these relations, to experience them more fully, and perhaps to foster or enhance them in ways that are more in line with an ethic of care – in short, critical or creative empathy. Here, the invocation of critical empathy moves us directly away from any naive assumptions that women are more ‘caring’ towards the environment (as has been suggested by some ecofeminist thought). Yet there is nonetheless a recognition that it is dangerous to eschew emotional lives and relations, particularly if we do so in favour of a rational or overly intellectual approach to these challenges that have been shown to fall short multiple times. In this way, we return full circle to the first point elaborated above, in terms of the need to move beyond ‘rational’ approaches, or a sole focus on utilitarian or productive relations with resources such as water. The Rethinking Rivers Network at the University of British Columbia – a collaboration of scholars and artists associated with the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, and beyond – therefore aims to highlight the important creative and political work that needs to be done to understand, embrace and foster our emotional connections to rivers, and to think through the significance of our emotional lives in relation to changing ecologies, whether they be those that focus on river ecologies, or the state of other species and more-than-human beings who also depend on those ‘natures’. Focusing particularly on the experience of recent migrants with rivers, the Rethinking Rivers Network is interested in how populations ‘make meaning and sense of place(s) through expressions of love, loss, memories, mourning and lament for the past, and hopes for an imagined future’. To date, the Network has brought together students, activists and artists to do river walks, record the sounds along the rivers, and engage in other artistic expression in ways that underline our relationships to those ecosystems, and the complex emotions that these environments – and changes to them – bring forth in us (GRSJ

harris  |   175 Rethinking Rivers 2013). Moving towards an intersectional approach to these questions, the Network seeks to explore how different commun­ ities (migrant, aboriginal, artistic or otherwise) differently experience and connect to rivers and other water bodies. In this intersectional approach, race, class, gender and migration experiences are some of the ways that diversity is explored through these relations. This fourth dimension is one where work is particularly nascent, but where I for one can see many exciting ways forward for FPE, and for studies of nature–culture or nature–society studies more generally (see the recent volume by Chen et al. 2013 for another key example). As Neimanis (2012) offers in her essay ‘Feminist subjectivity, watered’, there may be radically different ways of thinking about subjectivity if we take seriously the complex relationships we have with water – the water that runs through us, that connects us to other living beings, and so forth. Taking these connections seriously, she suggests we also might radically reconceptualize our relations to other beings. It is worth quoting her at length: Becoming a body of water as feminist figuration, inspired by a more aqueous politics of location, would contribute to the renegotiation of the relationship between nature and culture within feminist thinking, and demand attention to the ways in which we as feminist subjects can also be posthumanist, obligated to more-than-human bodies. It would also continue to pay unflinching attention to the systematic oppressions that still affect some humans more than others. But to become a body of water as feminist figuration can also help us reimagine water itself as more than metaphorical vehicle for postmodern fluidity, as more than instrumentalised resource to be commodified and managed, and as more than passive receptacle for our human excretions and anthropo­genic wastes. Might we imagine water instead as a responsibility asking us to respond? (Ibid.: 39)

In this spirit, we can imagine a host of questions and possibilities that arise with more attention to emotion, affect and reimagined subjectivities. We can ask both what meanings we attach to nature and what complex changes and losses hold importance for us, as well as what the potential for creative expression, critical empathy or other reimagined subjectivities might be to help us forge more sustainable and equitable relationships with our surroundings. As

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well, there is clear potential to foreground artistic and emotional responses to various ‘crises’ of neoliberal environmental governance. The work of behavioural and social environmental studies has made it increasingly clear that scientific facts and ‘rational’ responses are often not those that win the day – evidence suggests that people often engage in certain behaviours despite the knowledge they have of the environmental harm they may cause (Robbins 2007). Here again, theorizing more fully emotional lives related to natures holds vast and relatively untapped promise. FPE is well situated to be at the forefront of such engagements. Building post-colonial, decolonial and feminist-ecologicalinspired alternatives to neoliberalized environmental governance What is possible in terms of building on feminist, decolonizing and other critical approaches and methodologies to be able to think about counter-logics and counter-hegemonies in the world of neoliberalized environmental governance? I have explored in this chapter some potential avenues towards answering this question via an approach that emphasizes the everyday, embodied and emotional dimensions of these issues, and also offers several touch-points and possible ways forward. While I have emphasized FPE as a fruitful point of departure for these concerns, these are also issues that are being emphasized from other perspectives. Just to provide one example, the pathways I have offered here have clear resonance with recent work by Alex Loftus, who builds on sensuous, artistic and everyday encounters related to water access and the making of everyday life. As he writes, ‘within the quotidian acts of relating to one another and to “nature”, there are conditions of possibility for conceiving life differently’ (2012: 135). Contributing to these insights from an FPE perspective, we might also wish to dwell on what truly intersectional approaches to these issues might require, particularly given the complexity of linking intersectional processes of differentiation, or of linking the issues and politics of North and South more fully (Reed and Christie 2009; Mohanty 2002; Swarr and Nagar 2010; Laurie and Calla 2004). Such an approach, while merited, is necessarily complex and fraught. With this in mind, it is useful to close with a point of reflection. Feminist thought and practice cannot neatly be grafted on to the complexities of neoliberalism – just as feminist thought cannot be easily translated across sites without encountering friction and corres­

harris  |   177 ponding challenges. We only need to think about articulations with race, sexuality or complexities of North–South histories and relations to underscore this point. With this in mind, I reiterate a question invited by the volume as a whole: ‘what are the ethics, possibilities and risks of such travelling ideas and practices that connect complex lives, natures and genders?’ Keeping a focus on the possible ways forward I have sketched above, this is a useful place to leave the discussion. It is clear that in terms of both possibilities and potential limits, much work needs to be done. As always, we must undertake this with attention to history, context and trajectories that cannot be easily defined, nor easily diverted (a feature of ‘hegemony’ by its very definition). As we have learned through varied feminist movements and debates of the past several decades, these frictions cannot be shunned, and indeed might be better thought of as central to our work. As this entire volume has sought to highlight, feminist work is important in keeping issues of inequality and justice on the table, particularly when the aim of ‘hegemony’ is often to brush them aside, or feign ignorance. I have suggested that there is currently a great need to revisit environmental governance through an enlivened and intersectional FPE – one that works with and through feminist, decolonial, indigenous or other insights that emerge at the complex intersections of gender, sexuality, race and social justice. Com­bining these traditions and insights in creative, critical and empathetic ways is perhaps one of our best ways of thinking outside of, moving beyond and forging resistance to the ongoing neoliberalization of environmental governance – or at least the inequities and unlivable socio-natures that these trajectories too often engender. Note 1  It is the case that the broader development programme (GAP) that re­ sulted in the irrigation infrastructure also includes drilling wells in some villages for drinking water, or other modes of provi­ sion such as delivery by tanker trucks.

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180   |  five Loftus, A. (2012) Everyday Environmental­ ism: Creating an Urban Political Ecology, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Marston, S. A. (1990) ‘Who are “the people”: gender, citizenship, and the making of the American nation’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 8: 449–58. — (2000) ‘The social construction of scale’, Progress in Human Geography, 24(2): 219–42. Mohanty, C. T. (2002) ‘“Under Western eyes” revisited: feminist solidarity through anticapitalist struggles’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(2): 499–535. Mollett, S. and C. Faria (2012) ‘Messing with gender in feminist political ecology’, Geoforum, 45: 116–25. Morinville, C. (2012) ‘Beyond the pipe: participation and alternative water provision in underserved areas of Accra, Ghana’, MA thesis, University of British Columbia. Neimanis, A. (2012) ‘Feminist subjec­ tivity, watered’, Feminist Review, 103: 23–41. Nightingale, A. (2011) ‘Bounding dif­ ference: intersectionality and the material production of gender, caste, class and environment in Nepal’, Geoforum, 42(2): 153–62. Norman, E., C. Cook and A. Cohen (2013) ‘Introduction. Why the politics of scale matter in the governance of water’, in E. Norman, C. Cook and A. Cohen (eds), Negotiating Water Governance: Why the Politics of Scale Matter, London: Ashgate. Parmar, P. (2008) ‘Revisiting the human right to water’, Australian Feminist Law Journal, 28: 77–96. Peloso, M. (2014) ‘Water, the chase, and welfare: peri-urban water access and governance in Ashaiman, Ghana’, MA thesis, University of British Columbia.

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harris  |   181 women’, Latin American Research Review, 46(2): 5–28. Schroeder, R. (1999) Shady Practices: Agroforestry, Gender Politics in the Gambia, Berkeley: University of California Press. Sheppard, E. (2012) ‘Trade, globalization and uneven development: entangle­ ments of geographical political econ­ omy’, Progress in Human ­Geo­graphy, 36(1): 44–71. Sheppard, E. and H. Leitner (2010) ‘Quo vadis neoliberalism? The remaking of global capitalist governance after the Washington Consensus’, Geoforum, 41(2): 185–94. Shiva, V. (1999) Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge, Boston, MA: South End Press. — (2002) ‘Community rights, people’s sovereignty and treaties to reclaim the genetic and water commons’, Synthesis/Regeneration, 29, www. greens.org/s-r/29/29-24.html, ­accessed 20 February 2014. Sneddon, C. (2013) ‘Water, governance and hegemony’, in L. Harris, J. Goldin and C. Sneddon (eds), Water Govern­ ance in the Global South: Scarcity, Marketization, Participation, London: Routledge, pp. 13–24. Staeheli, L. A., E. Kofman and L. Peake (2004) Mapping Women, Making Poli­ tics: Feminist perspectives on political geography, New York: Routledge. Sultana, F. (2011) ‘Suffering for water, suffering from water: emotional geo­ graphies of resources acess, control and conflict’, Geoforum, 42(2): 163–72.

Swarr, A. L. and R. Nagar (2010) Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Truelove, Y. (2011) ‘(Re-)conceptualizing water inequality in Delhi, India through a feminist political ecology framework’, Geoforum, 42(2): 143–52. Walsh, C. (2012) ‘Of neo-constitu­ tionalisms, lefts, and (de)colonial struggles. Thoughts from the Andes in conversation with Breny Mendoza’, feminists@Law, 1. Waring, M. (1988) If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics, San Fran­ cisco, CA: Harper & Row. World Bank (1997) ‘Getting the private sector involved in water – what to do in the poorest of countries’, Note 102, P. Cohen (author), Washington, DC: Private Sector Development Department (PSD), World Bank. Wutich, A. and K. Ragsdale (2008) ‘Water insecurity and emotional distress: coping with supply, access, and seasonal variability of water in a Bolivian squatter settlement’, Social Science & Medicine, 67: 2116–25. Yates, J. and K. Bakker (2014) ‘Debating the post-neoliberal turn in Latin America’, Progress in Human Geogra­ phy, 38: 62–90. Yeboah, I. (2006) ‘Subaltern strategies and development practice: urban water privatization in Ghana’, Geo­ graphical Journal, 172(1): 50–65. Zwarteveen, M. Z. (1998) ‘Identifying gender aspects of new irrigation management policies’, Agriculture and Human Values, 15(4): 301–12.

6 | CHALLENGING THE ROMANCE WITH RESILIENCE: COMMUNITIES, SCALE AND CLIMATE CHANGE

Andrea J. Nightingale

Introduction The spectre of climate change has brought into popular circulation notions of resilience and socio-environmental change (Folke 2006). As the global climate warms and temperature and moisture regimes are predicted to make fairly radical shifts in many regions of the world, policy-makers are increasingly focused on whether or not so-called vulnerable communities are resilient enough. Resilience is assumed to be closely related to adaptive capacity, or direct responses to perceived environmental change that moderate harm or capitalize on possible benefits (Klein et al. 2007: 750). As a result of this association of resilience with adaptation, there is emphasis on knowledge, response systems and hazard management. Much like social capital or sustainability, resilience is a term that resonates for many people and invokes a sense of strength, flexibility and durability. Yet precisely what resilience is, who is responsible for gaining or conferring resilience and how it is to be maintained over time and space are unclear. Perhaps of most concern for critical scholars, increasingly ‘adaptive capacity’ and ‘resilience’ are considered inextricably linked to economic growth and diversification. At the moment, resilience is being institutionalized into policy and practice across the globe in relation to climate change. Some countries, such as Scotland, have a ‘resilience strategy’, while in other places, such as Nepal, resilience appears in numerous development policy documents across a range of sectors (Scottish Government 2013; CIF 2011). As I explore in more detail below, resilience remains poorly defined and can take on significantly different meanings in different contexts. These different definitions of resilience are in part linked to the scales at which climate change is assumed to occur as well as current neoliberal efforts to rescale governance. Scale within

nightingale  |   183 resilience policies is often construed in fixed terms. As such, I argue that ‘resilience’ is not an innocent concept, but rather is an excellent lens through which to examine the politics of scale in climate change debates. The motivation for this analysis derives from my deep sense of unease about the promotion of social capital and communitybased networks as the solutions to local development. My research is based on Scotland and Nepal, and despite the stark differences between those two countries, in both at the moment there is far more emphasis on local entrepreneurship, fostered through strong local networks and social capital, than there is on resource redistribution by the national state – i.e. ‘neoliberal development’. Yet people in remote rural villages in both countries tend to maintain networks far outside of their locality for trade, friendship and to cope with their remoteness; indeed, as Doreen Massey has argued, it is these networks which constitute place, whether remote or not (Massey 2005). I have lived and worked with people in ‘remote’ parts of Nepal and Scotland and listened to their complaints about how they are assumed to be provincial, naive or, worse, lazy. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In some respects, this chapter is a response to those ethnocentric characterizations of rural people and places. I seek to show how people’s sense of themselves and their place is often in friction with how resilience planners imagine they might foster social capital and harness networks into their disaster risk management schemes. In this chapter, then, I take a look at resilience policies from Scotland and Nepal and compare them to how local people understand what is required for long-term community existence. I show that there is a ‘scale mismatch’ between the way policy-makers define resilience and the technologies through which they believe it will be achieved, and how local people define community resilience and their aspirations for livelihood security. I interrogate how scale is enrolled as both a limitation and an emancipatory factor when people assert new socio-environmental notions of ‘the local’ and ‘connection’ in the face of top-down policies and programmes aimed at generating resilience. In order to contextualize the use of resilience in my two case studies, I first briefly outline what I mean by the politics of scale. Afterwards, I review relevant scholarship on resilience and then explore in detail two policy documents from Nepal and Scotland and

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compare them to field-based data on ‘community’ in both places. I conclude by arguing that a closer interrogation of scale offers an exciting new direction for feminist political ecology. Scale1 Scale has been theorized in both the social and the ecological/ biophysical sciences. It generally refers to the physical dimensions of observed phenomena, or the content or extent of the scale, such as a segment of a territory (‘national scale’). Scale, however, is not equivalent with level (Cash et al. 2006). Rather, level refers to locations upon a scale, or the way that scale is organized. The national scale – i.e. territory or population – is not the same as the  national level, which refers to various institutions and actions – i.e. national government – that apply to the entire nation. Scale and level are often conflated, but when a more careful conceptual­ ization of scale is used, it becomes possible to understand that, for ­ex­ample, the scale of knowledge is not the same as the level at which that knowledge is mobilized or the level of the actors who use it (Ahlborg and Nightingale 2012). In this view, ‘local knowledge’ is not scaled to the local, but rather refers to the level of the actors who hold that knowledge. For example, local fishermen’s know­ ledge of their trade is not confined to the local scale. Rather, they have knowledge about fisheries governance policies being set at the scale of the European Union, and they draw on ‘global’ fisheries understandings  in their own practices. So while it may be called ‘local knowledge’, ‘l­ocal’  ­signals the level of the actors rather than the extent or content of the knowledge itself. This is a crucial part of my argument, as the way that knowledge is scaled and the levels at which it is assumed to be required are deeply embedded in the politics of resilience. Most often scale is assumed to exist ‘out there’ as something that is real and which simply needs to be measured or named. In contrast, human geographers have argued that scale is socially constructed and some have suggested it is purely a social product (Marston 2000; Herod and Wright 2001). Yet I would argue that scale is not simply arbitrary or only political. Rather, scalar concepts reflect relationships that do exist ‘out there’ in the world, even if the act of privileging and making visible some relationships rather than others is thoroughly social, and thus political. In other words, regardless of how ‘natural’

nightingale  |   185 the relationships may appear, the moment of defining and measuring scales serves to order the world both conceptually and materially. And this ordering by different actors often conflicts. For feminist political ecologists, retaining a clear distinction between scale and level provides theoretical leverage to illuminate how global and national programmes targeted at localities carry with them crucial assumptions about the scale of access to, control over, distribution of and knowledge of resources for local-level actors. Resources here are broadly defined: i.e. financial, technical, ecological and social resources. These assumptions can come into conflict with local people’s understandings of the same, and it is this moment of conflict which should be of most concern to policy-makers who genuinely have an interest in promoting ‘resilient communities’. Below, I illustrate how these conflicts emerge through the case studies and speculate on their implications for resilience policies. Resilience:2 the new holy grail of c­limate change adaptation The concept of resilience that informs current policy usage emerged from ecological systems theory in the late 1970s and early 1980s. More recently, resilience has been applied to so-called ‘socio-ecological systems’ or SES, which use notions of social capital, learning and institutions to conceptualize how social systems might be resilient, particularly in relation to climate change (Berkes and Folke 1998; Janssen and Ostrom 2006). Despite its roots in new institutional economics (Ostrom et al. 2007), SES thinking is fundamentally based in the natural sciences and mobilizes an understanding of socio-ecological systems as dynamic and revolving around multiple stable states rather than equilibrium (Folke 2006). This was a fairly radical intervention into ecosystems thinking as, prior to that, ideas of ‘dynamic equilibrium’ and ‘climax stable states’ were still widely accepted (Clements 1936; Pimm 1991). ‘Resilience’ itself refers to the capacity of a system to absorb shocks while retaining the same populations and properties (Holling 1973; Cote and Nightingale 2011). When systems lose resilience, they reach a ‘tipping point’ where they shift into another phase altogether. This ‘phase shift’ can be negative or positive depending on which kinds of populations and properties emerge, how they are valued and by whom. Thus, while ‘resilience’ at first glance appears to be a value-neutral concept, I have argued elsewhere (Cote and Nightingale 2011) that

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it is inherently embedded within normative ideas of what states are desired and what kind of shocks are acceptable. Resilience is thus a concept linked to a natural science understanding of environmental systems, which accounts for both dynamic change and the capacity of systems to cope with variability and disturbance without causing a phase shift. These concepts have been translated into socio-ecological systems with a rather wholesale application of ecosystem principles to social systems when modelling how societies change (Berkes and Folke 1998; Anderies et al. 2004; Olsson et al. 2004; Folke 2006). Academics and policy-makers concerned with climate change have found important resources within resilience thinking to predict how climate fluctuations might be absorbed by society, or how societies might experience various kinds of crises due to environmental shocks (Adger 2003; Gallopín 2006; Nelson et al. 2007). Most ideas of adaptive capacity within climate change policies have been taken from resilience thinking and reflect how socio-ecological systems are under­ stood to transform across scales: ‘coupled socio-ecological systems (SES) grow, adapt, transform and collapse, at different scales – the stages of adaptation and collapse are not viewed as alternative routes but rather as part of a cycle that is driven by fast and slow, small and big events that can cascade up the scales’ (Lambin 2005: 177). Within climate change arenas – both scholarly and policy related – resilience is assumed to be built and expressed at multiple scales, with coordination across scales particularly important. These ideas appear harmless enough on the surface and they raise important questions about the interconnectedness of different processes, actors and responsibilities across scales. In this chapter, however, I want to argue that the framing of resilience and its grounding in the natural sciences are contributing to a fundamental devaluing and sidelining of local people’s own understandings of community, flexibility, adaptation and livelihood security. The ecological systems metaphor does not translate well to social systems and, of more concern, it is adding further justification for the narrow economic logic that underpins what is ultimately an anti-politics (Ferguson 2006), technocratic (Nightingale and Ojha 2013) and neoliberal, managerial approach to climate change adaptation. This kind of logic subsumes the profound social-political ­struggles that necessarily surround changing resources and economies. As the

nightingale  |   187 feminist political ecology literature has amply shown, such s­truggles are manifest in contestations over distribution of, access to, control over and knowledge of resources (Rocheleau et al. 1996; Elmhirst 2011), struggles that also have profound consequences for the (re) production of social inequalities and ecologies (Nightingale 2006). It is therefore imperative to challenge the current romance with resilience in order to think about other framings of ‘adaptive capacity’. Such framings need to capture the alternative rationalities people apply to their own livelihood aspirations and strategies for long-term livelihood security. Resilience in Nepal and Scotland Given the proliferation of discourses and policies aimed at ‘resili­ ence’, it is not surprising to find that in both Nepal and Scotland policies linked to climate change adaption have been framed in terms of resilience. What is more interesting is the content of these policies and how they reflect the confusion and (mis)use of the concept of ‘resilience’. Here I focus specifically on the ‘Building community resilience: Scottish guidance on community resilience’ (Scottish Government 2013) document and Nepal’s ‘Strategic program for climate resilience’ (CIF 2011). In this section, I briefly introduce the two policies and then analyse them for content. In the following section, I compare these results to how local people frame similar issues.

Scotland  The ‘Building community resilience: Scottish guidance on community resilience’ (Scottish Government 2013) policy is fundamentally oriented towards disaster management, including political as well as environmental events. However, environmental events are seen as caused by ‘nature’ and thus are not political. In July 2013, it was the only one of two resilience statements/policies available in Scotland, the other being the 2012 document, ‘Preparing Scotland’, which is similarly oriented towards disaster management and coordination across scales by emergency responders (Scottish Government 2012). There are no other resilience policies in Scotland to date, but by October 2013 communities were able to apply for resilience funding in addition to carbon reduction activities from the lottery-funded Climate Change Challenge Fund. The 2013 document follows the 2012 policy and defines resilience at several scales, particularly in relation to infrastructure and institutions: ‘the capacity of an individual,

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community or system to adapt in order to sustain an acceptable level of function, structure and identity’ (Scottish Government 2013: 7, section 1.1.1). For resilience professionals, this usually means thinking about how to sustain the range of interdependent infrastructure and systems which support the functioning of a community, and particularly, their ability to continue to deliver their priorities, and to ‘bounce back’ after being hit by an emergency or disruptive challenge. (Ibid. 2013: 7, section 1.1.2)

The document acknowledges the influence of ecology and systems thinking in its development and, of most concern to me, makes a direct link with individual and collective behaviour in the same sentence: Community resilience is based on a culture of preparedness, in which individuals, communities and organisations take responsibility to prepare for, respond to and recover from emergencies. It has evolved as a way of thinking from a number of academic disciplines, notably ecology and systems engineering, and more recently has emerged as one of the most important concepts in the literature of resilience management. (Ibid. 2013: 7, section 1.1.4)

The three components of resilience are assumed to be: awareness, assets and propensity to act. Awareness is framed as a quality held by individuals, whereas assets are assumed to exist at multiple levels and propensity to act is notably vague in terms of the level at which it is derived. When one probes in more detail the proposed mechanisms for achieving resilience in these domains, the solutions are technical (training, infrastructure improvements) and include private sector and community investment. In short, the Scottish resilience policy is fundamentally about producing networks of actors and ‘assets’ that can operate across scales and levels to help communities cope with disasters. Importantly, it is underpinned by the sense not only that individuals and communities at present are located within smaller territorial scales, but that their knowledge is either inadequate, or needs to be brought together with knowledge from larger scales. They are therefore assumed to be inadequately prepared to cope with disasters, and emergency services provided by the central state cannot be relied upon to have adequate capacity to address community needs.

nightingale  |   189 Here the authors of this policy have revealed a profoundly scaled notion of the state as well as climate change/severe weather events. Emergency services in Scotland are decentralized on the whole – in fact a key purpose of the 2012 document is to ensure coordination between dispersed forces – but are also believed to be located at scales beyond the locality (Scottish Government 2012). Places are assumed to need support from other scales to build the kind of assets and propensity to act that will make them resilient. It is noteworthy that the plan does not propose an expansion of emergency services across scales; rather it is designed to build awareness and assets within the business and voluntary sectors that are ‘outside’ the state, located at the local scale, which can be relied upon to collaborate with the state emergency services in an extreme event. Both political and environmental disasters are similarly assumed to occur at scales beyond the locality, although not in all cases. This is consistent with climate change predictions, which at present are only accurate at very large scales. In most instances, it is not possible to model temperature and moisture changes at the scale of the nationstate, let alone community level (Xu et al. 2006). And politically derived disasters (i.e. terrorism) experts assume to be perpetuated from other scales, even if the event is local. The Scottish resilience strategy is designed around the assumption that many communities will be affected at one time, or individual communities will be cut off from outside services, and the impacts in different localities will  not necessarily be the same: ‘In practice, community resilience will reflect the diversity of Scottish communities and the risks which they face’ (Scottish Government 2013: 8, section 1.1.10). The policy is firmly grounded in systems thinking that assumes if the parts of the system are adequately connected, then problems of crossing scale and coordination between individuals and institutions that may not have the same goals can be overcome. Altering the behaviour of individuals and ensuring adequate assets is emphasized to cope with potential conflicts of interest or political struggles over response behaviours and systems. Indeed, conflicts are carefully sidestepped, and rather the need to involve businesses in ensuring their own resilience, commitments from the voluntary sector and ensuring that individuals are free of legal ramifications if they respond are propounded instead. Before moving on to the Nepal policy, I want to pull out two

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other conceptual points, which I return to in more detail below. First, there is an assumption in this document that the assets (knowledge, resources, skills and networks) of communities are contained to the same scale as the territory of the community. The goal of implem­ enting this policy is therefore to try to link scales and ensure that community-level awareness and assets are adequately informed by larger-scale knowledge and decisions. Secondly, part of the implicit message is that communities cannot expect adequate support from larger-scale actors and systems in a disaster. Rather, they need to be able to access services for themselves and have at hand what they need locally if they are to be truly ‘resilient’. And while there is much emphasis on services, propensity to act, etc., there is much less emphasis on the redistribution of central state resources to achieve these goals and how much it might cost. It is worth mentioning here that even in the context of Scottish devolution, the UK is one of the most centralized states in the EU in terms of its taxation and state financial policies (Lee et al. 2005). Neoliberal reforms that began in the 1990s mean that local authorities have had their local development budgets stripped and such funds are now available through the quasi-public ‘Scottish Enterprise’ or ‘Highlands and Islands Enterprise’, which disperse funds for business innovation (Painter 2012). This means that localities have almost no state-sponsored mechanism to raise their own funds, and rather have to depend on donations and community fund-raising efforts such as festivals (staffed by volunteers) and other events. The emphasis on business and voluntary-sector engagement in resilience preparation and training therefore should not be surprising.

Nepal  I now want to turn to Nepal, considered to be one of the world’s climate change ‘hot spots’. Nepal’s ‘Strategic program for climate resilience’ (CIF 2011) is very different from the Scottish policy. In the first place, the strong sense that resilience has a financial base to it is explicit, perhaps reflecting the fact that the funding for writing the document came through climate investment funds, and the three donors involved are all well-known finance/private-sector-oriented ­donors: the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the International F ­ inance Corporation (IFC) and the World Bank. The document begins from a biophysical perspective and focuses in particular on response to hazards, building community capacity and private sector involvement in response

nightingale  |   191 mechanisms. But this document diverges from the Scottish one in placing much more emphasis on finance. In both documents, ‘soft’ mechanisms are emphasized, but how to achieve them is profoundly different. Nepal is framed as needing development and mobilizing people through participatory user groups, practices which by now are well established in development. In Scotland, the focus is on knowledge sharing and building trust within communities, practices which are somehow believed to be lacking at present. The Nepal document identified five areas of intervention/themes (ibid.): 1 Building Climate Resilience of Watersheds in Mountain EcoRegions. Addresses the problem of too little or unreliable access to freshwater resources by communities in mountain ecosystems for drinking, irrigation and other uses (p. 18). 2 Building Resilience to Climate-Related Hazards. Addresses the priority risk of floods and droughts that take human lives and undermine progress on economic growth and poverty alleviation (p. 19). 3 Mainstreaming Climate Change Risk Management in Development. Facilitates the integration of climate change risk management into development planning and practices (p. 20). 4 Building Climate Resilient Communities through Private Sector Participation. Addresses some of the key agricultural productivity constraints (p. 20). 5 Enhancing Climate Resilience of Endangered Species. Addresses the risks of climate variability and change for the habitats of endangered wildlife species (p. 21). These five areas of focus may seem rather random to those un­ familiar with Nepal, but in many respects they are well-known domains of development intervention. The policy does not depart from the overall logic of development aid, which assumes that people lack knowledge and skills and that outside intervention is required to overcome inadequacies in human and financial capital. The watershed as a domain of practice signals some of the new terminology in development following the Paris Accord, wherein donors promised more cooperation with each other and coordination across sectors. However, the strong emphasis on water resources as ‘watersheds’ indicates they have not really embraced the more holistic use of the

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term to encompass cross-sectoral planning. In the USA, watershed management is a term used to integrate a variety of ecology and political levels such that socio-environmental problems at the scale of the watershed are holistically addressed (Bhaduri et al. 2000). The more narrow interpretation in Nepal is not surprising given the biophysical environment-oriented ministries that were involved in its development. However, it also needs to be acknowledged that the decline in water resources is considered one of the most worrying climate impacts predicted for the Himalayas (Regmi 2009). Similarly, hazards management has certainly been in the central frame in Nepal at least since the 1970s. Much of the initial investment in the forestry sector was driven by the belief that deforestation caused landslides. While the equation has been proved to be substantially more complex and also linked to continental uplift, heavy rains and poor vegetation cover do increase the rate and severity of landslides (Thompson and Warburton 1985; Ives and Messerli 1989). It is therefore not surprising that hazards management is emphasized, and this of course is also consistent with the Scottish policy. The main departure here from the Scottish policy is the focus on private sector investment. In Scotland, the engagement of the private sector seems to be more at the level of awareness and preparing businesses to rapidly return to ‘normal’ functioning after a dis­aster. Whereas in Nepal the promotion of enterprise and small-scale entre­ preneurs, markets and access to finance for the agricultural ­supply chain, including farmers, are all key areas of ‘climate-proofing’ development (CIF 2011: 20, 47). It is noteworthy that out of four components deemed to be the focus for strengthening resilience one of them deals directly with private sector involvement (no. 4) and one other includes contributions by the private sector. Component 1 engages the private sector in conserving water resources: ‘Participation of the private sector will be sought, especially in promoting water saving technologies. NGOs are expected to play an important role in project implementation’ (ibid.: 19). Component 3 refers to development, but here the emphasis is more technical, emphasizing how programmes can be ‘climate sensitive’. The remaining three components are clearly technical and relate to biophysical hazards. Within all five components, there is a strong assumption that financial resources and economic diversification are required for resilience. And indeed, the document is noteworthy for the extent to

nightingale  |   193 which it places monetary figures on either investments to be made, or the costs estimated for generating resilience. The document concentrates on the need for the private sector to take control of key infrastructure such as hydropower installations and for more credit availability to the agricultural sector. The emphasis on investment in the agricultural sector in part reflects the general view within development practice in Nepal that rural residents remain dependent on subsistence agriculture. While this picture is no longer very accurate (see below), most climate change projects begin with the poor, resource-dependent victims of natural hazards as a starting point. But the financial emphasis also reflects the move towards enterprise development and market formation as the solution to underdevelopment. These solutions to ‘resilience’ reflect the turn towards neoliberal models of development practice and are relatively new (although increasingly ubiquitous) tropes of development practice. I probe this last point more fully below.

Resilience, neoliberalism and the devolution of responsibility  Taken together, there are two points to be made about these policies and how they represent a disturbing trend in the way states expect to support their populations in the face of major biophysical transformations, namely: the framing of resilience, and the promotion of a neoliberal logic of governance. First, in both we find that resilience is framed as responses to biophysical shocks; however, the types of shocks that are assumed to be important are very different. This clearly reflects the prevailing logic within the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which defines adaptation as driven by biophysical change. Therefore an environmental determinist understanding of adaptation and resilience is not necessarily surprising, but it does require critical scrutiny. As I have argued elsewhere, I firmly believe that the most challenging adaptation issues will emerge from the social politics that surround ‘climate change’ as a discourse and policy instrument, rather than from biophysical change itself (Nightingale 2009). Fears over climate migrants, increasing violence and water wars are being used to justify major new investments in trans-boundary issues, securitization of borders and increased investments in police forces (Dalby 2009). Yet in each of the two policies discussed here, social politics are considered only in terms of institutions and techno-engineering mechanisms.

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Secondly, the documents are clearly embedded within an over­ arching neoliberal framing of ‘good governance’. They are both ­concerned with devolving responsibility for resilience to locally based populations, and yet how they propose to do this, and what support is required to achieve these goals, is very different. And perhaps most importantly, as I demonstrate below, they reflect very different understandings of livelihood security than that expressed by local people themselves. Therefore, I believe we are seeing a top-down dictating of governance needs for local people, providing a new twist in what are otherwise becoming rather commonplace networks for devolving responsibility without centrally redistributing resources. I now turn to case study material from both countries to show how ‘local’ people are expressing very different kinds of understandings of community and aspirations for long-term livelihood security. ‘It’s how we do things’: community in Scotland Communities in Scotland are generally fairly dispersed outside the ‘central belt’, which runs between the main cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. The ‘Building community resilience’ (Scottish Government 2013) document in some ways is implicitly oriented towards the Highlands and Islands, where communities can be quite remote and emergency services quite far away. There are many single-track roads and some places can be cut off for days by icy roads in the winter. While of course major disasters in the central belt would be equally challenging given the number of people potentially affected, those communities are also in closer proximity to emergency and medical services. In the Highlands and Islands of Scotland there are strong narratives about community. I am going to contain my discussion to the northwest coast from where my case study material derives. As the policy itself acknowledges, communities in Scotland are extremely diverse and my discussion should not be taken as ‘this is how it is’. Rather, I am interested in showing how some people and some communities express rather different understandings of their own capacities and linkages to other scales to those assumed in policy. Some communities are deeply divided, and often such schisms reflect either multigenerational disputes or tensions between ‘incomers’ and those with longer roots in the area. The two communities I focus on here are no different. Both are small coastal villages, relatively

nightingale  |   195 remote from other settlements, where fishing is an important economic activity. They are popular as places for holiday homes and for people seeking an alternative to professional lives in the city (often London). Despite these tensions, both places also have a strong sense of ‘community’ and have cooperated on a number of initiatives. The first community mobilized approximately fifteeen years ago to build a village hall. They received match funding from Highland and Islands Enterprise, but were required to raise a significant amount of capital themselves. In a village with around three hundred households, this was not a trivial task. The most successful of their fund-raising activities was an annual village gala (festival), which became known as the ‘best’ gala in the region. A committed group of local people volunteered their time to organize and run the event. As a testament to their dedication, the toilets were clean and well supplied at 3 a.m. after fifteen hours of non-stop drinking, dancing and games. As one organizer told me, ‘Yeah, that’s because we were in there every half an hour to check they were OK. No one working the gala is allowed to drink. We have our own party a day or two later.’ While clean toilets in a remote muddy field covered by a large marquee might not seem like a big deal, it was attention to such details which helped cement the reputation of the gala. The community raised enough money over the course of ten years to pay off all the debt for the village hall (which has a full-sized basketball court/ gym, tables and chairs to host large dinners or events, community computers, a kitchen and space for the village shop). The hall is now a source of revenue and has a large capital fund (over £100,000) that can be used for building maintenance and to co-fund other village activities. While the intention was not to promote economic activity, the hall is definitely an important village asset that can be used to help generate local enterprise; the village shop being a key example. In this place, community is defined by who gets involved, and who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ tends to shift with the context. Some summer residents are considered ‘in’ if they have family roots in the area and if they adopt an appropriately respectful attitude towards full-time residents. Other full-time residents are considered ‘out’ if they are too pushy about their own agendas. Many of these tensions manifest around the environment. ‘Incomers’ are often attracted to the nearby ‘wildlands’ and stunning vistas of the sea. Long-time residents also place a strong value on the aesthetic qualities of their homes, but they

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equally value the signs of a working community: fishing creels, boats, tractors, ploughed fields and other technologies that literally sit on the landscape and help to sustain their economic activities (see also MacDonald 1998). Community, therefore, is a concept that is rooted in place but not equivalent with place. The scale of the community at times stretches to people who have long since moved away, and at other times is contained to those who live on tenant farms inherited from their grandparents’ grandparents. The second community is similarly located in an aesthetically beautiful location on the sea, popular among summer visitors. Local residents have established a community company, which operates a petrol pump and has plans to invest in a hydroelectric scheme to generate electricity for community consumption. The company has served to pull various networks together, but also acts as a divisive force, starkly emphasizing who is committed to the community by patronizing the petrol pump (where prices are necessarily higher than outside the village, given its location) and those who do not.3 In this place, the shared sense of isolation and a commitment to staying in such a remote place are cornerstones of building a sense of ‘community’. As one man put it, ‘… what it is like to live here … the blues and greens, people in the city don’t have that’.4 In contrast to the first place, some people who have been here the longest are often seen as regressive and a barrier to innovation and investment in activities that will contribute to long-term livelihood security for full-time residents. A number of ‘incomers’ are rather highly valued for their capital investments in businesses that provide employment and their willingness to think creatively about how to make a viable local economy. These kinds of understandings of ‘assets and capabilities’ are very different from those expressed in the ‘Building community resilience’ (Scottish Government 2013) document. On the ground, people are well aware that some alliances are short term and oriented only towards specific events, whereas other alliances (i.e. the gala committee and the community company) reflect deeper alliances and commitments that can be deployed towards a number of activities. Conceptually in these understandings, the scale of the community is not static (Massey 1994, 2005). Rather, at times ‘community’ is under­ stood to be particular networks of people, many of whom may not actually live in the area any more or who are there temporarily (perhaps equivalent to ‘communities of practice’ named in the ‘­Building

nightingale  |   197 community resilience’ document, although I would argue that the networks I am referring to are more transient), and at other times they encompass anyone in close proximity. Such an understanding of place resonates strongly with feminist theorizing on space and place, wherein space is conceptualized as ‘stretched-out social relations’, and place as an event in which people and materials come together in a given moment, and as such are unrepeatable. Both theoretically and empirically in these examples, then, ‘community capabilities’ are not only derived from the locality. Yet when confronted with policy initiatives, local people’s experiences are confined to a rigidly conceived local, territorially based scale. Perhaps most importantly, the agenda to ‘build trust’ and ‘abilities to cooperate’ written into a national policy document is potentially offensive to people’s understandings of themselves. As my fisheries work showed strongly, there is a deep distrust of policy-makers, not least because of the patronizing attitudes towards them local people have experienced. As one man said in reference to an environmental group’s attempts at ‘educating’ local people on the importance of environment, ‘They tell us we need to learn to care for the environment. I find that offensive. I am the environment. My family has lived on this piece of land for over two hundred and fifty years …’5 In fisheries, such experiences are even more pronounced. Fishermen consistently express a sense of being misunderstood, not listened to, with their needs not taken into account (Nightingale 2011, 2013). Local people’s commitments to and understandings of their environments are based on multi-scalar knowledges learned through schools, work activities, everyday experience, popular media and stories passed down through generations. And importantly, they define environment to encompass work, history, tenure and the social politics of governing their landscape. Similarly, people express a commitment to community that goes well beyond ‘trust’ and place. In my fisheries work, I found that there was strong social pressure for fishermen to adhere to local ‘gentlemen’s agreements’ that sought to reduce conflict and competition in the fishery. When I asked a local respondent whether she agreed with this assessment, she cut across me and said, ‘They don’t have a choice. It’s how we do things here. I doubt it’s conscious.’ These tendencies should not be conflated with the kind of cooperative user group so ubiquitous within the common property literature (Ostrom

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1997). Rather, here subjectivities are subtler and pressures to co­ operate emerge from coercive forms as well (Nightingale 2013). The quote shows instead the way that people in these two communities frequently mobilize ‘place’ as a way to separate their culture from ‘outsiders’ (or ‘incomers’), and yet this understanding of place is not simply territorial. This sense that ‘it’s how we do things here’ is a powerful motivation for bringing people together, fostering certain kinds of networks and instilling a commitment to community cooperation. Yet, as the above quote on environment demonstrates, if people perceive that top-down policies fail to recognize those local understandings and commitments, they are likely to be resisted. I have witnessed Scottish Government ‘consultations’ and heard the kind of disparaging and ethnocentric attitudes many people have towards the residents of the west coast. It is the clash between those practices and attitudes which is most likely to undermine resilience in Scotland, not the lack of ‘assets and capabilities’ of local people. The experts taught us all we know: Nepal In Nepal, understandings of community are not really so different from those in Scotland, and are also contextual and multi-scalar. Most people have strong ties to extended family networks that are often not territorially based. Caste distinctions serve to further create divides among people who may be living in close proximity, in ways that are not so dissimilar from the ‘insider’/‘outsider’ distinctions made on the west coast of Scotland. The importance of these networks is perhaps best captured through the concept of ‘aphno maanche’, or ‘your own people’. Aphno maanche relations are most often based on filial ties, but they can be cultivated as well. Increasingly in the new political context, aphno maanche ties are sought with government officials at all levels as it is through those relationships that access to resources is secured (Nightingale and Rankin 2012; Nightingale and Ojha 2013). In addition to these networks there are the ubiquitous ‘user groups’ that have been formed through development projects to tackle everything from mothers’ issues, microcredit and community forestry to road management. Each of these networks serves to bring people together in different ways, for different purposes, and often in a transitory manner. Nepal’s resilience policy document mainly recognizes user groups

nightingale  |   199 as a technology through which cooperation and ‘development’ can be achieved and, where mentioned, see caste and other culturally defined networks as barriers for marginalized people to gain access to knowledge, inclusion and to remove their dependence on natural resources. Most user groups are assumed to be territorially based and rely upon the ‘equitable’ engagement of diverse users. Yet equitable engagement itself is designed to help overcome gender, caste and other socially based inequalities. This kind of understanding of ‘community’ is extremely naive in light of the current mobility of Nepal’s population. The civil war that raged between 1996 and 2006 helped to fuel what was already significant outmigration of young people from rural villages (Sharma 2008). The war, combined with economic opportunities in South-East Asia and the Middle East, and a quest for higher education in Kathmandu, India, Europe and North America by those able to find opportunities, means that many rural villages are now almost completely devoid of able-bodied people aged seventeen to forty. For example, when travelling into the district of Khotang in eastern Nepal, porters were in such short supply that we had to pay the few we found twice the daily rate we paid our highly educated research assistants. We were assured we had not been singled out, and the same exorbitant rates were charged to migrants from abroad returning with accumulated capital (often migrants do not manage to accumulate). The lack of productive labour power and stable populations in rural Nepal therefore sits uneasily with desires to devolve governance of key livelihood resources to voluntary community user groups. To assume that resilience will be built through cooperating user groups, based upon proximity and shared commitment to place, is problematic. In contrast to how many people in Scotland reject ‘external’ narratives of their knowledge and capabilities, few Nepalis contest the assumption that they need more knowledge. On the one hand, this is due to the poor education system, which tends to leave people hungry for more understanding, rather than feeling they have been ‘educated’. On the other hand, people have taken up and readily repeat developmentalist narratives of lacking knowledge and understanding, or ‘awareness’, as it is translated in Nepali. The following quote is representative: ‘ours is a suffering village, we are a backward people, lacking awareness. We need a [foreign] project to aware us.’ Both the use of ‘aware’ as a verb and representing oneself to foreigners as

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lacking in both consciousness and various dimensions of ‘development’ are very common. In addition to this outward acceptance of their ‘backwardness’, many people in Nepal see education as the best path for improving their life chances. One family I know starved seasonally for years after selling their land in order to educate their sons. Their gamble paid off, their educated sons now have jobs and the family no longer goes hungry for several months a year. Their intention with education is to allow their offspring to ‘jump scale’ (Smith 2002) such that they can operate outside the locality, whether that is through migration or through having access to larger-scale networks that can bring them long-term access to resources (developmental, financial and political). As one man told me in reference to his sons, who were working in Dubai, ‘if they are successful, they will settle down there [another place in Nepal], where there are facilities and development [bikas]’. So while the emphasis on knowledge in the resilience strategy is in line with local people’s own aspirations, there is a scale mismatch between the two. The resilience strategy is concerned with linking scales such that local people will have a greater understanding of the hazards in their own locality (assuming that to be a relatively clearly defined space), have better access to advance warning systems and take up new agricultural technologies. This is in contrast to the desire for education by local people. Educating children is targeted at removing them from the confines of their locality. Indeed, as the earlier quote suggests, these days success is often measured by whether or not one’s children manage to successfully emigrate to either Kathmandu or ‘the west’ (Europe or, preferably, North America). All this mobility adds another mismatch between the strategy document and local people’s experiences. The strategy places a lot of emphasis on increasing economic diversification and removing people’s dependence on natural resources. While this is in line with local people’s own desires, the strategy is at least ten years out of step. Most rural Nepalis abandoned reliance on rain-fed agriculture long ago. While there are no statistics available, based on twenty-five years of experience working in some of the poorest and most remote districts, my data show that migration and multiple occupations have long been a livelihood strategy for the rural poor. The poorest households tend to divide their time on a daily basis between primary production, wage labour, entrepreneurial activities (the production of

nightingale  |   201 handicrafts, etc.) and labour obligations for households with whom they still maintain patronage relationships. This diversity of livelihood strategy helps to ensure they are not dependent on one source of food/ income. So while on the one hand the resilience strategy could help to support this trend, on the other hand the assumptions embedded in the document mean that it is not likely to recognize or support the kinds of locally initiated livelihood diversification I describe here. Finally, the resilience strategy document places a lot of emphasis on financial resources and the need to either generate more locally, or to provide access to credit as a solution to disaster recovery. ­Access to credit is definitely a major issue for people in rural Nepal. Many end up paying astronomical interest rates to local moneylenders (sometimes in excess of 40–50 per cent) and find themselves losing their land and other assets as a result. Yet this desire for cheap credit and more cash is subsumed to their sense of which activities and networks are most important for their long-term livelihood security. I have shown elsewhere (Nightingale and Ojha 2013) that at least in a forestry context people have chosen to support a programme which gives them fewer material benefits rather than one that seems to ‘represent’ them. And I found similar behaviours in relation to my work on political change, where people supported politicians who they believed were aphno maanche in some way, as opposed to party platforms that spoke to their more immediate needs. These findings suggest that while access to financial assets is certainly important, it is often not considered the most important for Nepal’s marginalized people. Rather they rely on wider networks of patronage and kinship to ensure access to state and developmental resources, and invest in education and migration as livelihood diversification strategies. A question that emerges from this analysis, then, is whether most development practitioners are ignorant of such dynamics or whether they are unable to translate them into technical outputs.

Community, belonging and livelihood security  In both the Nepal and the Scottish cases, there are three key issues that emerge. First, sense of belonging is very important. Cultural recognition and maintenance of community ties are very strongly valued in both places by many people. In some respects, both resilience plans try to build from this, but they are fundamentally uninformed by the realities of the multi-scalar politics through which ‘belonging’ emerges. Belonging is

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produced relationally with social exclusion, and the same processes through which one comes to be accepted as part of the community, or can access resources through the community, simultaneously serve to exclude others (Korf 2010; Cooke and Kothari 2001). So in terms of resilience, belonging is a tricky and ultimately political business. Regardless of whether it works to include more than exclude, it is certainly not going to be fostered by top-down policies. Secondly, in both places there is a desire for economic diversification. In the two Scottish villages, people are acutely aware that local jobs as well as services (the shop, petrol pump) are crucial to the maintenance of the community. A lot of volunteer effort goes into ensuring that those institutions are maintained and can serve as meeting places or crucibles for economic and social activities. In Nepal, there is much less commitment to ‘community’ in rural villages; rather the desire for economic diversification is expressed through family networks. This is not to suggest that families always help each other. On the contrary, I have been close to many families where brothers and sisters or first cousins are in competition with each other over who can be the most successful. Nevertheless, one family member diversifying is often used as a vehicle for other f­amily members to also emigrate or to gain access to new educational opportunities. The resilience strategies take a far more instrumental approach to financial assets and economic diversification. Resilience is assumed to come from having enough alternative resources to cope with the complete loss of core livelihood assets (i.e. through a landslide, flood or disruption in electricity supply). Whereas for local people in Scotland and Nepal livelihood security tends to be more rooted in sense of place, community, family ties, outside connections and the desire to transform the ‘backward’ image of their villages. Thirdly, the scale at which villages are conceived by local actors is different to the scale used in the resilience plans. At times, local people bound their community in territorial terms, but more often they think in terms of networks, which extend through and well beyond the territorial space of the village (Massey 2005). They are linked through a variety of mechanisms, and when required these wider networks are used to help generate capital, act as safe refuges or provide emotional support for relationships that are otherwise too close to discuss with neighbours. The resilience plans are aimed at cultivating similar networks, but they take a far more technocratic and

nightingale  |   203 static approach to them. They talk explicitly about linking scales, but here they are equating scale with territory, and assume that networks do not cross and penetrate into different scales. As a result, they miss a crucial feature of so-called remote communities – namely, their abilities to be connected outside of place. It is these connections which will be vital in disasters, and indeed local people are well aware that their long-term ‘resilience’ depends on such networks. Response to a big flood, for example, will be based more on these kinds of connections than on the sorts of ‘trust’ relationships described in the policy documents. Thus, in both the Nepalese and the Scottish examples, people are expressing very different kinds of understandings of and aspirations for long-term livelihood security to those written into their respective resilience strategies. The emphasis on disaster management and economic activities fails to capture other aspects of everyday livelihood security important to people in localities. And perhaps most importantly, the static conception of scale that both use cannot account for the multi-scalar networks local people mobilize in their own attempts at generating long-term resilience for themselves and their communities. Conclusion In this chapter I have compared two ‘resilience’ policies from very different parts of the world, Scotland and Nepal. My purpose in doing so has been to highlight first that the current romance with resilience is quite problematic given the lack of clarity over precisely what resilience is and what is required to promote it. The two cases show that resilience is often framed in terms of sudden shocks, and that most often it is assumed that those shocks will be caused by biophysical change. This framing obscures the social-political mechanisms through which biophysical (and social) change is mediated and thus serves to depoliticize what are inherently contested issues, and to justify the technocratic approach to climate change currently dominating the world. Locally based people tend to view environmental shocks differently. For them a shift in the social politics that changes their relation with the land is an environmental shock (among others), whereas within policy, environmental shocks are assumed to have a purely biophysical derivation. Thus when we probe this scale mismatch between policy and on-the-ground realities, it becomes clear that ‘resilience’ is not an innocent concept, but rather is both bound up

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in and reflective of the politics of scale within climate change debates. In short, the framing of resilience serves to devalue and sideline local people’s own understandings of community, flexibility, adaptation and livelihood security. The cases also indicate there is a scale mismatch between how communities are conceived in policy and how they operate on the ground. Both policies take a territorial approach to community and, indeed, to disasters. It is assumed that resources and knowledge need to be built within the local scale, and thus there is emphasis on cooperation across scales and the need for capacity-building locally. An approach that better reflects the realities of today’s communities, however, would recognize how people at the local level can access multi-scalar resources. Local people and resources are not contained to the local scale, but rather are produced through interactions and exchange across scales such that they manifest within territories. This devolving of responsibility for response to the local level is not new to resilience policies or disaster response. Rather, it reflects the wider neoliberal logic that has become embedded in social, political and financial policies in most parts of the world (Painter 2010; Rose 1999). The Scottish strategy is in many respects a direct recognition that in the event of a widespread disaster, the state does not have enough resources to respond. The solution is to build resources within localities that are outside of the state, but which can cooperate effi­ ciently with state services when required. There is no explicit mention that communities will be given additional state resources to build up this capacity; rather they are encouraged to do so for their own good. Making resilience funding a possibility through competitive grants to the Climate Change Challenge Fund similarly reflects this logic. The Nepal document places far more emphasis on the lack of resources within both the state and localities, but also assumes that the building of local user groups, gaining private sector involvement and education will solve those problems. In part because of the availability of external donors, there is more promise of funding to implement these plans, but it should be noted that most of this money goes to expensive international and national consultants. Very little money is available to communities for developing their own initiatives. Top-down imposition of policy without the same flow of centralized resources is characteristic of neoliberalism. This kind of logic has been blamed for the decline in social services, a widening gap

nightingale  |   205 between rich and poor and over-exploitation of resources across the globe, but somehow that has not dampened the enthusiasm of those who continue to promote these programmes. The kind of feminist political ecology analysis I have offered here suggests that starting at the level of the community – and recognizing it as a multi-scaled, networked set of actors and material relationships – might be one way to ensure that people can indeed exercise the ‘self-determination’ that both they and policy-makers want. Finally, and of most concern to me, the comparison of these two policies highlights a number of ethnocentric assumptions embedded within them. Each document emphasizes dissimilar issues and proposes different mechanisms for response. These divergences are in part driven by the underlying environmental determinist logic in both documents, but they also reflect ethnocentric assumptions about the capacities and ability to access resources of ‘local’ rural populations. In Scotland, people are assumed to need ‘information’ and ‘community trust’, whereas in Nepal they are assumed to need ‘economic diversification’ and ‘capacity-building’. In other words, Nepal is seen to lack financial and human capital, whereas Scotland is believed to lack social capital. Not only do such assumptions help to perpetuate a problematic global order (Ferguson 2006; Tsing 2005), but they also are potential blind spots if policy-makers are truly interested in promoting ‘resilience’ to climate change. The reality is that both places need more outside investment and would be far more resilient if taken seriously as people and places with already existing knowledge, capacity and assets, not only by central state actors, but also by well-meaning international programmes intended to improve their livelihoods. In conclusion, the romance with resilience is disturbing because it seems to be providing fresh justification for technical solutions and investment in planning and policies – the Nepal case is particularly relevant here, with success being measured by the number of plans written. In addition, ideas of resilience are placing responsibility for access to resources and services in the laps of local-level actors. If the emergency services cannot respond adequately, the blame can be placed on the local community, who failed to have their own emergency warning systems in place. Or if people continue to engage in land-use practices that place them at high risk in a disaster, it is because they failed to diversify their livelihoods or understand the knowledge that was given to them.

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Yet I would argue that their precarious situation is equally, if not more so, caused by centralized states that fail to redistribute resources and a global economic system that concentrates wealth, knowledge and resources in relatively small parts of the world. New fears over climate migrants and terrorism are used as justification for tightening immigration policies and border controls, increasingly ensuring that these dynamics remain as they are. Promoting a resilient world in the face of major climatic change will certainly not be achieved through such a silo mentality. Rather, we need to be thinking and acting across scales, recognizing how we are connected rather than separated, and placing greater demands on both the state and the private sector to redistribute resources. Feminist political ecologists can make significant contributions towards these ends by exploring scale mismatches and recognizing how scale is co-opted by local people as a way to both distinguish themselves from the outside and to engage across scales. Notes 1  My conceptualization of scale is deeply indebted to Helene Alhborg’s thinking on scale and the joint paper we wrote: Ahlborg and Nightingale (2012). 2  My thinking on resilience is deeply indebted to Muriel Cote and the joint paper we wrote on resilience and social theory: Cote and Nightingale (2011). 3  I am indebted to Sinead Fortune’s unpublished MSc dissertation from the University of Edinburgh’s Environment and Development MSc programme for providing more substantial data on the community company than the data I had on it from my fisheries research. 4  Quote from one of my interviews, 2009. 5  Paraphrase from an interview in 2002.

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208   |  six gender: work, gender and environ­ ment’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24(2): 165–85. — (2009) ‘Warming up the climate change debate: a challenge to policy based on adaptation’, Journal of ­Forest and Livelihood, 8(1): 84–9. — (2011) ‘Beyond design principles: subjectivity, emotion and the (ir-)rational commons’, Society & Natural Resources, 24(2): 119–32. — (2013) ‘Fishing for nature: the politics of subjectivity and emotion in Scot­ tish inshore fisheries management’, Environment and Planning A, 45(10): 2362–78. Nightingale, A. J. and H. R. Ojha (2013) ‘Rethinking power and authority: symbolic violence and subjectivity in Nepal’s Terai forests’, Development and Change, 44(1): 29–51. Nightingale, A. and K. Rankin (2012) ‘Peace building from the grassroots? The practices and challenges of local democracy in Nepal’, Edinburgh: Uni­ versity of Edinburgh and University of Toronto. Olsson, P., F. Berkes and C. Folke (2004) ‘Adaptive co-management for build­ ing resilience of social-ecological systems’, Environmental Management, 34(1): 75–90. Ostrom, E. (1997) ‘Self-governance and forest resources’, Paper presented at ‘Local institutions for forest manage­ ment: how can research make a difference’, CIFOR, Bogor, Indonesia. Ostrom, E., M. A. Janssen and J. M. Anderies (2007) ‘Going beyond panaceas’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 104(39): 15176–8. Painter, J. (2010) ‘Rethinking territory’, Antipode, 42(5): 1090–118. — (2012) ‘Regional biopolitics’, Regional Studies, pp. 1–14. Pimm, S. L. (1991) The Balance of Nature? Ecological Issues in the Conservation

of Species and Communities, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Regmi, M. R. (2009) ‘Climate change issues of Nepal: challenges and perspectives for future generations’, Progress in Environmental Science and Technology, 2: 267–8. Rocheleau, D., B. Thomas-Slayter and E. Wangari (1996) Feminist Political Ecology: Global Issues and Local Ex­ periences, New York: Routledge. Rose, N. (1999) Powers of Freedom: Re­ framing Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scottish Government (2012) ‘Preparing Scotland: Scottish guidance on resil­ ience’, ed. Safer Scotland, Edinburgh: Scottish Government. — (2013) ‘Building community resilience: Scottish guidance on com­ munity resilience’, ed. Safer Scotland, Edinburgh: Scottish Government. Sharma, J. (2008) ‘Practices of male labour migration from the hills of Nepal to India in development dis­ courses: which pathology?’, Gender, Development and Technology, 12(3): 303–23. Smith, N. (2002) ‘New globalism, new urbanism: gentrification as global urban strategy’, Antipode, 34(3): 427–50. Thompson, M. and M. Warburton (1985) ‘Uncertainty on a Himalayan scale’, Mountain Research and Development, 5(2): 115–35. Tsing, A. (2005) Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Xu, Chong-yu, Lebing Gong, Tong Jiang, Deliang Chen and V. P. Singh (2006) ‘Analysis of spatial distribution and temporal trend of reference evapotranspiration and pan evapora­ tion in Changjiang (Yangtze river) catchment’, Journal of Hydrology, 327(1): 81–93.

7 | A NEW SPELLING OF SUSTAINABILIT Y: ENGAGING FEMINIST-ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE THEORY AND PRACTICE

Giovanna Di Chiro

Response-ability is staying with the knots, staying with the trouble, inheriting the damages and the achievements … Getting at ‘loss’ is a part of response-ability. (Haraway 2013)

Introduction: a socio-ecological genealogy Engaging the contradictions between theory and practice (hooks 2003), the ‘two cultures’ of the sciences and the humanities (Snow 2001 [1959]), and the fraught division between scholarship and activ­ism (Hales 2008), my professional background reflects a strong desire to mix things up and to cross or transgress disciplinary and political boundaries: I have degrees in biology, environmental studies and natural resource management, a PhD in History of Consciousness, and for several years I was the director of Environmental Programmes at Nuestras Raíces (Our Roots), a grassroots organization that focuses on community gardens, food justice, environmental health and community-based sustainability in urban, Latino Massachusetts. Viewed variously as interdisciplinary, unconventional, outside-the-box or unhinged, my educational and career choices have not resulted in my  ‘staying with  the programme’, so to speak. Rather, in my intellectual and professional worlds I have chosen  to  ‘stay with the trouble’, as Donna Haraway puts it (2013). In this chapter, I explore how I strive to stay with the trouble in my own interdisciplinary work in environmental and feminist studies. The central trouble or object of interest for me in my scholarship and political engagement is to examine the ways our institutions, disciplines and knowledge systems embrace ‘disconnectedness’, or what Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham have called  ‘hyper-separation’ (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013). In Western societies most notably, the world is organized through categorical and binary distinctions (e.g.

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nature and culture, ecology and politics, humanities and the natural sciences). One way I have attempted to ‘stay with the trouble’ in my academic and activist work is to think and act across these binaries by engaging with transdisciplinary fields such as environmental justice studies and feminist political ecology. Another way I have stayed with the trouble has been to negotiate the divide between academia and the community, having worked both as a faculty member teaching environmental studies and women’s and gender studies and as a community organizer with a community-based organization. I inhabit both worlds and in some ways I see myself as an ‘outsider within’ in both worlds (Collins 2000; Braidotti 1994). These can be troubling and stifling divisions – I do not take lightly the idea of ‘staying with the trouble’, but I do think we need not stay with the programme that supports business as usual. We need in fact to stray from it and experiment with lively critical analyses, action-based research collaboratives and hands-on community development projects that can offer productive and life-enhancing possibilities. In my own socioecological genealogy as a feminist environmentalist/feminist political ecologist, my interests in interconnectedness, transdisciplinarity and embodied action research assemblages were greatly inspired by the women leaders in the environmental justice movement, an international network of grassroots activists and engaged scholars that ‘troubled’ conventional theories and practices about ‘environmentalism’ and environmental studies. Environmental justice: an ecological politics of articulation Activists and scholars of environmental justice articulate widespread concerns with hazardous pollution and environmental degradation with what are typically considered more ‘social’ issues such as civil rights, land rights, race and class politics, economic and livelihood concerns, including unemployment and affordable healthcare, and community action and civic participation (e.g. see Bullard 2005; Bryant and Mohai 1992; Hofrichter 2000; Adamson et al. 2002; Pellow and Brulle 2005; Steady 2009).1 Rooted in a lived understanding of ‘social nature’, activists draw upon their own communities’ experiences of environmental contamination and displacement to demonstrate the bodily risks of the disarticulation between humans and nature – their ecological knowledge includes stories about high levels of cancer, respiratory illnesses and birth defects, foul-smelling water and lung-

di chiro  |   213 burning air, fish kills from polluted rivers and streams, collard greens from the garden ‘that grow funny and taste bad’, pet deaths and farm animal deformities, reduced access to forests, wildlife and livelihoods from land privatization, tribal land expropriation for nuclear weapons testing and radioactive waste dumping, and, most recently, detailed accounts of the devastating impacts of heavy storm surge, flooding and severe winds brought on by powerful hurricanes and superstorms. The environmental justice movement’s theory and activism produce environmental knowledge that demonstrates the enmeshment of ­human history and environmental change; activists’ narratives of lived naturecultures (Haraway 2007) in the contemporary world, rife with stories revealing the connections between the deteriorating health and well-being of poor and marginalized communities and the polluted and neglected environments in which they live, clearly highlight the violence inherent in the persistent paradigm that produces the dualism between humans and nature. Far from conceiving of nature as an abstracted disembodied ‘elsewhere’, environmental justice activists show that the health of their communities and the health of the environment are inseparable. Paradoxically referred to as ‘anthropocentric’2 by some mainstream environmental studies scholars (i.e. being more concerned with the fate of poor, inner-city minorities, rainforest-slashing-and-burning ­peasants, or over-breeding Third Worlders than with protecting ‘­ nature’) the environmental justice movement is anything but. Activists in the movement, many of whom are women of colour, have clearly argued that the pollution and depletion of bodies of water, bodies of land – in effect, the entire body of the earth – ultimately affect the biological bodies (and the body politic) of men, women, children and all other living beings; if the earth is poisoned and disintegrated, so will be our communities. As environmental justice activist and Akwesasne Mohawk midwife Katsi Cook has pointed out, ‘the intricate culture of the Mohawk people [is tied] to the water, the turtles, the animal relatives and, ultimately, the destruction of the industrialized General Motors Superfund site’, a hazardous waste landfill containing 823,000 cubic yards of highly carcinogenic PCB (polychlorinated biphenyl)contaminated materials that lies adjacent to the Akwesasne reservation along the St Lawrence River (quoted in LaDuke 1999: 12). Also advocating non-anthropocentric ‘otherworldly conversations’ (Haraway 1991) for earthly survival, in reference to her breast cancer activism,

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toxicologist and environmental justice activist Mary O’Brien speaks to the unboundedness of the ‘human place in nature’: [We must become] a people who acknowledge that our sense of community ultimately includes more than people, and that people are more than the false bottom line … [Our] campaigns will define us as women who understand that our breasts are inseparable from all that is, and has been, and will be here on Earth. That a whale’s breasts are our breasts. That an outdoor stream is as holy as the stream of breast milk entering an infant’s mouth. (1999: 11)

Neither nature- nor anthropo-centric, these sentiments represent enacted naturecultures and earth-bound cosmopolitics; the perspective that our environmental policies and practices must articulate the destinies of all communities and environments, human and non-human. Seres Puentes: bridge-building as feminist ecological politics My academic interests in the in-between, trans- and symbiotic relationships governing biological processes, and my feminist politics and social change interests committed to building bridges, alliances and coalitions across differences of many kinds to address social and environmental problems, brought me to the transdisciplinary fields of environmental justice studies and feminist political ecology, and ongoing partnerships with environmental justice activists. One of the most influential theories of building feminist and environmental justice assemblages was introduced to me by a group of women environmental justice activists in Arizona. In 1999, the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) offered a ‘toxic tour’ led by two activists, Teresa Leal, a Mexican Opata-Maya and founder of the organization Comadres, and Rose Marie Augustine, a Latina activist who founded Tucsonans for a Clean Environment. Playing on the popular interest in ecotourism, this ‘ecotour with a twist’ (Di Chiro 2003) took a group of academics on a bus trip along the Santa Cruz river from Tucson, Arizona, to the Mexican border at Ambos Nogales (the border cities of Nogales, AZ, and Nogales, Sonora, Mexico), identifying sites/sights of environmental injustices along the way. Using community-generated maps and oral history, Leal and Augustine made visible for the academic ‘tourists’ the social, health and ecological problems facing the predominantly Latino and indigenous communities living in this industrial corridor, now even

di chiro  |   215 more intensified by the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. The toxic tour included meetings with other activists from Comadres, including Maria Elena, a factory worker who organizes women workers in the maquiladoras, the foreign-owned assembly and manufacturing plants located in the free trade zone on the Mexican side of the US–Mexico border, which, in addition to operating with reduced tariffs and taxes, often evade Mexican environmental and workplace regulations. Comadres helps organize women workers’ unions in the maquiladora factories to provide workers with job training in non-traditional skills, with information about labour issues, reproductive justice and civil rights, with training on gender awareness and empowerment, and with information about the impact of industrial chemicals on their health and how to access clean water in the colonias (‘neighbourhoods’ or shanty towns, located near the maquiladoras to house the factory workers). On the toxic tour, Teresa explained that she organizes these labourintensive tours to reach out to sympathetic academics, researchers and other allies because she believes it is important to develop our identities and capacities as seres puentes (‘bridge beings’). Teresa borrows the concept, similar to Gloria Anzaldúa’s (2002) nepantleras (a Nahuatl word meaning ‘those who inhabit spaces between worlds’), from her Opata heritage and explains that seres puentes contribute important social, political and ecological roles in the community as bridge builders, or ‘transition people’ who can facilitate passage between multiple worlds and who can inhabit and move within and between different institutional structures, different disciplines, different cultures and different publics. For many years since our first meeting on the toxic tour in Arizona, Teresa, Rose and I have worked together with many other diversely situated comadres to try to create more culturally responsive and academically relevant research and learning communities (Di Chiro 2003). The positionality of seres puentes really stuck with me. Practising naturecultures and feminist ecocosmopolitics in environmental studies Taking seriously Donna Haraway’s argument that ‘it matters what ideas we think other ideas with’ and ‘staying with the trouble’ (2013), I am interested in questions about how and in what ways such ideas, stories, languages, pedagogies, practices and/or reinventions matter, and to whom they matter. As I discussed earlier, the central critique

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or ‘trouble’ that has animated my feminist political ecological practice has focused on the socio-ecological legacies of the particular Western worldview that constructs a categorical distinction between humans and nature. How might we think and live differently on the planet and with each other if this oppressive dichotomy were to be unmade and reinvented? And, to paraphrase Haraway, which ideas should we use to represent, unmake and ‘heal’ a damaged socio-ecological world, and invent a new one?3 In earlier writings, I traced the emergence of the idea of ‘global environmental problems’ and how the deployment of ideas of the ‘global’ and ‘planetary’ run the risk of producing universalizing discourses, which often function to mask and whitewash/greenwash the lived realities and responsibilities of different groups of people across the world in the name of totalizations such as ‘Our Common Future’, ‘Spaceship Earth’, ‘the Anthropocene’ or ‘Sustainability’ (Di Chiro 2003, 2008) (see also Nightingale Chapter 6, this volume, on scale). In a recent article I critiqued the contemporary, mainstream climate movement’s reliance on globalizing and apocalyptic discourses, which tend to overlook or underemphasize the burdens and responsibilities for climate change disproportionately shouldered by rich and poor peoples and rich and poor nations, and often create an ineffective eco-politics of paralysis, inevitability or crisis fatigue, and lead to the consideration of extreme and unjust techno-fix solutions, including, for example, geoengineering, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (plus conservation) (REDD+), population control and carbon emissions trading (Di Chiro 2013). Have the various ‘turns’ in critical environmental thought (the global turn, the spatial turn, the ecological turn, the knowledge turn, the material turn, the animal turn, the cosmo turn, the anthropocene turn) helped to think/create new and better ideas and more just and sustainable worlds? Recent survey research in the USA has shown that many Americans are ‘turning’ away from thinking about global warming (only 16 per cent say they are very concerned about climate change and motivated to do something about it), even with mounting evidence piling up every day of tangible destruction from severe storms, floods, drought, massive species extinction, sea-level rise and melting glaciers.4 Have the recent ‘turns’ made it even easier for the mainstream climate movement and environmentalism to turn a blind eye to rising global poverty levels, economic austerity programmes, epidemic asthma rates and ever-increasing numbers of ‘climate refugees’? Is the social justice

di chiro  |   217 component of ‘environmental justice’ obviated through the appropriation of the vocabularies of relationality, holism and cosmopolitanism? Placing environmental justice and human rights at the centre of their international eco-political activism, the cosmo-vision/politics of indigenous, Aboriginal and First Nations peoples have become more visible and audible to the Western world in recent years (Idle No More, La Via Campesina, Yinka Dene Alliance, Indigenous Environmental Network, Ecuadorean and Bolivian constitutions encoding the rights of Mother Earth and Pachamama, People’s Declaration on Climate Justice and the Rights of Mother Earth) (Walsh 2011). How does the appropriation/resuscitation of diverse forms of cosmo-thinking (from Afro and indigenous life visions, from Western philosophy and science, from global environmental/climate movements, from diverse spiritual traditions, from ecocriticism) (Adamson 2012) help to remake new, multi-species, multicultural, interdependent, life-enhancing relationships and politics of nature and society, to transform, reshape and ‘dance a new world into being’? (Klein 2013). Indigenous activists have been front and centre in many of the recent protests against climate change, including at the ‘Forward on Climate’ action against the Keystone XL pipeline held on 17 January 2013, in Washington, DC, and co-organized by 350.org, Hip Hop Caucus and the Sierra Club. Many of the speakers at the event were First Nations and Native American women from different tribes who described the devastation that fossil fuel extraction and climate change are already inflicting on their communities. One woman activist from the Cree Nation told the cheering crowd – estimated to be close to 40,000 people – that she felt for ‘the first time that white people were working hand in hand with indigenous peoples’ to resist the colonial, extractivist and genocidal mindset that had caused so much destruction worldwide (the protest in fact was comprised of a predominantly white crowd despite its location in Washington, DC, a city whose population is over 50 per cent black). In an interview with Canadian writer/activist Naomi Klein, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Mississauga Nishnaabeg), one of the women leaders of Idle No More,5 echoes the concern of many climate activists who lament that we may be running out of time and losing the opportunity to create another, more sustainable world: Societies based on conquest cannot be sustained, so yes, I do think

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we’re getting closer to that breaking point for sure. We’re running out of time. Maybe my ancestors felt that 200 years ago or 400 years ago. But I think that the impetus to act and to change and to transform, for me, exists whether or not this is the end of the world. If a river is threatened, it’s the end of the world for those fish. It’s been the end of the world for somebody all along. And I think the sadness and the trauma of that is reason enough for me to act. (Klein 2013, emphasis added)

In the face of 500 years of resistance to conquest and in the current era of radical extractivism, Idle No More activists are clear about the urgency of the moment. However, the move to integrate ‘traditional ecological knowledge’ into environmental thinking (as in Our Common Future, also known as the Brundtland Report, issued by the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987), Simpson argues, must not reproduce this ‘very extractivist mindset’ intent on using indigenous peoples’ knowledges, but not actually ‘having a conversation and having a dialogue and bringing in indigenous knowledge on the terms of indigenous peoples’. She emphasizes, ‘If you’re not developing relationships with the people, you’re not giving back … You’re moving to someplace else.’ The alternative to extractivism, Simpson argues, ‘is deep reciprocity. It’s respect, it’s relationship, it’s responsibility, and it’s local.’ And it’s about bringing an idea into being; doing, and making, and acting: In Anishinaabeg philosophy, if you have a dream, if you have a vision, you share that with your community, and then you have a responsibility for bringing that dream forth, or that vision forth into a reality. That’s the process of regeneration. That’s the process of bringing forth more life – getting the seed and planting and nurturing it. It can be a physical seed, it can be a child, or it can be an idea. But if you’re not continually engaged in that process then it doesn’t happen. I think Idle No More is an example because I think there is an opportunity for the environmental movement, for social-justice groups, and for mainstream Canadians to stand with us. So I think it’s a shift in mindset from seeing indigenous people as a resource to extract to seeing us as intelligent, articulate, relevant, living, breathing peoples and nations. I think that requires individuals and communities and people to develop fair and meaningful and authentic relationships with us. (Ibid.)

di chiro  |   219 At the end of the interview with Klein, Simpson recounts one of the Anishinaabeg’s creation stories about a muskrat and a turtle. In this story there has been a large-scale environmental imbalance resulting in a crisis, a large flood covering the entire world. One of the sacred beings, Nanabush, is trapped floating on a log along with all the animals. Everyone is overwhelmed, there is no land in sight, everyone is panicking, and no one knows how to solve the problem of ‘making a new world’ now that this one is under water. Finally the animals start to dive into the water and swim down to the bottom to collect a paw-full or claw-full of dirt that they will need to remake the world. After many animals have tried and failed, the muskrat eventually succeeds in grabbing some dirt, and the turtle lets her spread it on top of her shell. Nanabush and all the animals breathe life into the dirt by dancing in a circle on top of the turtle’s shell, which grows, expands and becomes the world in which we are now living (called Mikinakong – the place of the turtle – by the Anishinaabeg peoples). Simpson argues that ‘we’re all that muskrat’: [W]e all have that responsibility to get off the log and dive down no matter how hard it is and search around for that dirt. And that to me was profound and transformative, because we can’t wait for somebody else to come up with the idea. The whole point, the way we’re going to make this better, is by everybody engaging in their own being, in their own gifts, and embody this movement, embody this transformation. (Ibid.)

A few weeks following the Forward On Climate action in Washington, DC, students from Swarthmore College’s Mountain Justice group (a national student organization working in solidarity with ‘front-line’ communities fighting mountain-top-removal coal mining) hosted a student Convergence called ‘Power Up! Divest from Fossil Fuels’ (Swarthmore College, 22–24 February 2013). Nearly two hundred students from seventy-seven US colleges and universities attended the weekend Convergence and participated in dozens of workshops focused on building a movement for climate justice and organizing strategies to support the divestment movement on college campuses. Wearing small squares of orange cloth pinned to their shirts in solid­ arity with the ‘red square’ of the Quebec Student Movement,6 the student organizers of the Convergence proclaimed that ‘divestment is a tactic; justice is the goal’.

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I was honoured that my environmental studies students at Swarthmore College asked me to co-lead a workshop at the Convergence on ‘building sustainable coalitions’ in the environmental justice and climate justice movements. My co-facilitator was Lilian Ix’Chel Molina, a seasoned community organizer and the director of the environmental justice programme at the Energy Action Coalition.7 With a room full of fifty energized students from around the country, we led a workshop entitled ‘Race, class and coalition politics: building an inclusive movement for climate justice’. We started the workshop with a community-building activity using three-foot lengths of rope arranged like spokes on a wheel. Each team of eight students was instructed to create the biggest knot they could in two minutes, and then to undo them in sixty seconds – sometimes the teams would be undoing knots that another group had made. Afterwards we had an exuberant and critical conversation about what the knots signify, how hard it is to undo the knots that another group has made, and (still spinning the metaphor) what it takes to figure out how to creatively weave and unweave ropes and other threads together. The student Convergence was highly successful in many ways. There were powerful presentations by leaders of front-line commun­ ities from indigenous territories targeted for tar sands development in the USA and Canada, from coal communities in Appalachia, from communities living alongside oil refineries on the Gulf Coast, and  from nearby rural towns in Pennsylvania living with polluted wells from hydro-fracking operations. And yet still the lines remain demarcated and we inhabit our separate spheres – privileged peoples and institutions (who have the money to invest in the mechanisms of financial capitalism in the first place) will demand ‘divestment’ from dirty, fossil fuel industries and stand in solidarity with the ‘front-line communities’ that bear the brunt of the excesses and depredations of the fossil fuel economy and many of whom are tragically forced to take the jobs (putatively created by that very same investment capital logic) in order to put food on the table and support their families. How do we create robust coalition politics and genuine and sustainable cosmopolitics? At our Convergence workshop, I introduced the group of college-age students to Bernice Johnson Reagon’s 1981 speech, ‘Coalition politics: turning the century’ (published in Smith 1983), which had profoundly influenced my own thinking about the

di chiro  |   221 hard work required to make social and environmental change. In her fierce words (speaking at a national women’s studies gathering), Reagon chastised those who turned to feminist politics yearning for and seeking a home-like refuge. Because women do not share a common experience or identity as women, she argued, feminism is always riven by differences and so feminist politics must embody coalitional formations, not home-like zones of safety (ibid.). The truth is, ‘coalitions are hard’, she goes on to say in the speech. They are diverse, uncertain, fractious, and sometimes they feel ‘unsafe’ and un-womblike. She put it very directly: ‘You don’t get a lot of food in a coalition. You don’t get fed a lot in coalition. In a coalition you have to give, and it is different from your home.’ But you try to do it because you know it’s the ‘only way you can survive’ (ibid.: 104). In an earlier article I wrote on the environmental justice movement, ‘Nature as community: the convergence of environment and social justice’ (1996), I analysed the use of what I called ‘nature-talk’ in environ­mental discourse and politics, a discourse I argued that repro­ duces Western societies’ nature–culture split, severs e­nvironmental issues from ‘social’ ones, and creates barriers to forging an inter­ ­ sectional environmentalism and building coalitions with environmental justice communities. How do we resist/refuse the return to or resorting to separate but equal political frames and formations? How do we choose which ideas/stories we use to think new ideas/stories to unmake and make new worlds (new cosmo-visions)? How do we ensure that nature-talk does not resurface or rematerialize as cosmo-talk as we reinvent and ‘turn’ to new eco-criticism and new eco-politics? I take seriously Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s urging that we embody that muskrat and join with all the other beings to search around for the paw-fulls of fertile dirt/soil to spread on the turtle’s back and ‘dance a new world into being’. A course on urban ecology In my university teaching, I strive to practise what I have called a ‘pedagogy of intersectionality’ (Di Chiro 2006) with the vision of integrating naturecultures/cosmopolitics into the curriculum of interdisciplinary environmental studies. I taught the course Urban Ecology in the Department of Environmental Studies at Mount Holyoke College from 2004 to 2008. Intending to put into practice environmental justice scholars’ and activists’ emphasis on the i­nterdependence

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of human health, ecological integrity and social justice, the Urban Ecology course challenges the conventional environmental focus on a socially decontextualized nature and on the disarticulation of humans and their environments. Designed as a community-based learning (CBL) course, Urban Ecology’s primary activity centred on an action-based research project in collaboration with the local community organization, Nuestras Raíces. Committed to pedagogical and research practices embodying participation, reciprocity and the co-production of environmental knowledge, the action research/ CBL model enables fruitful possibilities for enacting naturecultures in environmental studies. Nuestras Raíces was founded in 1992 by community residents to promote community development in the predominantly low-income Puerto Rican/Latino neighbourhoods of Holyoke, Massachusetts, by transforming abandoned city lots into urban gardens and farmers’ markets. The organization has evolved into a broadly based environmental justice organization linking social and economic development, ecological sustainability, environmental health, gender and racial/ethnic justice and cultural diversity.8 Typical of the demographic pattern documented by environmental justice scholars, the majority of Holyoke’s poor and low-income Latino residents live in neighbourhoods situated in the industrial section of the city and are disproportionately at risk of increased rates of environmental illnesses such as cancer, asthma and heart disease due to exposure to industrial toxins (Agyeman 2005). Although most of the once thriving paper mills and textile industry are no longer in operation, some remaining factories are still emitting environmental contaminants into the air, water, soil and bodies of south Holyoke’s communities. Moreover, most south Holyoke families live among the now abandoned, boarded-up and often contaminated factory buildings designated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as industrial ‘brownfields’, and find themselves contending with the illegal garbage dumping, looting and drug trafficking that frequently accompany the social and economic disinvestments in urban centres resulting from industrial flight and suburban sprawl (Bullard 2008). Unbeknown to most of my environmental studies students, the contaminated neighbourhoods of south Holyoke are not distantly ‘elsewhere’, and thus conveniently out of sight and out of mind, but only 4.3 miles down the road. Traversing borders of diverse kinds

di chiro  |   223 – geographic, linguistic, epistemic and cultural – our environmental studies class travelled this short distance to ‘meet our neighbours’, as one student described it, co-inhabitants of the Connecticut river watershed with whom we would study the environmental problems of this small corner of our shared bioregion and co-invent possibilities for socio-environmental change. Engaging Teresa Leal’s ‘seres puentes’ figuration, the class met with organizers in Nuestras Raíces’ bustling, multi-purpose community centre, El Centro Agrícola, to listen, learn and exchange our diverse socio-ecological knowledge systems and to share our visions for ‘sustainability’. Living in the shadow of the Mt Tom power plant, one of Massa­ chusetts’s ‘dirty five’ coal-fired electricity generators, the organizers spoke of the extraordinarily high levels of asthma and other respiratory illnesses suffered in the community. In addition to the Mt Tom facility, scattered throughout the south Holyoke neighbourhoods are other manufacturing plants that belch noxious fumes into the air and deposit layers of grimy particulate matter on to the sidewalks, windows and the soil, a particular concern to the community gardeners. ‘We think there’s a connection between our kids’ asthma and these factories,’ said lead organizer (now executive director) Hilda Roqué, pointing to a community-generated map indicating the clustering of the city’s toxic release sites in south Holyoke, ‘but the health department and the EPA say it’s not conclusive’. Other activists talked about the high rates of breast cancer, diabetes and heart problems suffered by their families, friends and neighbours. As we listened to residents describe painful stories of environmental illnesses, I watched my students’ faces express a range of emotions – sorrow, discomfort, anger. I wondered whether these feelings would inevitably lead to hopelessness and disengagement, or whether they could instead engender a sense of common purpose with people whose environmental predicaments were so different from their own. Although the organizers shared many stories of the environmental injustices facing their communities, they also talked excitedly about transforming the blighted urban landscape of south Holyoke into a ‘geo­­ graphy of hope’, a bountiful network of thriving community gardens yielding healthy, organic produce. One of the local urban gardeners gave students a tour of the Centro Agrícola’s sunny greenhouse, which houses the neatly arranged trays of vegetable starts for the spring planting. He also drew students’ attention to the aromatic hothouse

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cilantro, chillies and herbs used by the cooks at Mi Plaza, a neighbourhood café serving tasty Puerto Rican fare and exemplifying one of the organization’s local foods micro-enterprise projects. Two members of Nuestras Raíces’ youth group discussed their environmental education campaigns focused on recycling, soil erosion and ecological restoration, while another showed photos and maps of La Finca – Nuestras Raíces’ thirty-acre urban farm located along the Connecticut river, housing a community centre to support cultural events, a refurbished nineteenthcentury barn to breed Paso Fino horses, a farm store to sell local produce, and a community centre to offer environmental justice and food justice programming. From these conversations about the political ecology of south Holyoke exuberantly described by members of Nuestras Raíces, it became clear to my environmental studies ­students that ‘social nature’ – a term they had encountered in our course readings – was much more than an academic concept. After absorbing these stories of socio-environmental disinvestment and decay met by community resilience and transformation, my ­students began making connections between their own environmental studies education and what they had learned from the community members’ ideas and experiences. Together with the organizers, the students discussed how they could help Nuestras Raíces members meet some of their environmental justice goals. Could such an alliance between these two groups living side by side in the Connecticut river watershed create an approach to environmental studies unbounded by the ‘town and gown’ divide or by the disciplinary practices that dichotomize ‘social’ problems and ‘environmental’ ones? Inspired by Hilda Roqué’s conviction that Nuestras Raíces needed to ‘make some noise’ to inform local health officials, state agencies and the EPA of their community’s socio-environmental circumstances, the s­tudents decided to embark on an action research project to articulate the connections between the community members’ anec­ dotal health problems and the high pollution levels of the mixed industrial-­ residential zones where they ‘lived, worked, played, and attended school’. At the completion of the semester, the students prepared a presentation to display the results of their action research on the urban ecology of Holyoke to the members of Nuestras Raíces. Visibly responding to the ‘weight of the evidence’ documenting the environmental injustices their families and communities were struggling with, (now former)

di chiro  |   225 Executive Director Daniel Ross voiced what he believed the numbers and maps were revealing: ‘This is about environmental racism; it’s about the health of our community, and our children’s lives.’ With the goal of sustaining the action research assemblage and my ongoing collaboration with Nuestras Raíces, I taught the Urban Ecology course in subsequent semesters building on each class’s research. I and my students worked closely with Nuestras Raíces’ organizers to generate environmental health data to support an EPA community action research grant that I wrote in collaboration with the director of the organization. The EPA grant supported an expanded communitybased environmental health assessment programme and the creation of the ‘Holyoke Environmental Health Coalition’, a diverse coalition of community members, students and faculty from the Five Colleges consortium in western Massachusetts (2006–09). Deploying the research and grant-writing tools of academia, I wrote the grant for the next level of EPA funding to develop a series of community environmental health workshops and to support environmental justice organizing activities (2009–12). Through our community-based action research collaborations, which have included students from all the six colleges in the region,9 the leaders of Nuestras Raíces adopted an intersectional approach to its community organizing by expanding the organization’s original mission focusing on community gardens and urban farms to embrace an environmental justice and climate justice framework (Gottlieb and Joshi 2010). Building on the interconnections among struggles for community health, sustainable economic development and climate change mitigation, in 2010 a coalition of three local organizations (Nuestras Raíces, Nueva Esperanza and Co-op Power) launched a new, locally owned energy services company called Energía. Energía provides energy efficiency upgrades and retrofits including weatherization, insulation and solar hot water system installation for homeowners, multi-family housing projects and commercial buildings in the city. By improving the energy efficiency of the ageing nineteenth-century building stock in industrial cities such as Holyoke, Nuestras Raíces, which is the non-profit majority owner of this new for-profit, 24 per cent worker-owned company, is creating economic opportunities and career-path green jobs for local youth and reducing the greenhouse gas emissions associated with fossil fuel energy use in residential and commercial buildings.10

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In conjunction with this social entrepreneurial endeavour, in 2011 our action research assemblage founded AHH! (Action/Acción for a Healthy Holyoke), a diverse coalition and campaign to move the city ‘beyond coal’ by shutting down the Mt Tom coal plant, to ensure the clean-up of the site and to generate healthy and sustainable economic development for the community. Since its launch in April 2011, AHH! was successful in persuading the Holyoke City Council to establish a community advisory group (CAG) comprised of d ­ iverse community members, which would report directly to the city council. The CAG is charged with planning for the retirement of the coal plant, identifying and applying for reuse assessment funding, and researching and proposing just and sustainable alternatives.11 A former student in my first Urban Ecology course, who was hired by one of Nuestras Raíces’ partner organizations after her graduation, would become a CAG member helping to move Holyoke forward to a more sustainable future. Grounded in a commitment to activist scholarship, trans-communal organizing and embodied ecological practice, the Urban Ecology course challenges the conventional assumptions and perceptions in environmental studies of what constitutes the ‘dynamic interplay’ between humans and nature (Carson 1998 [1963]: 228) in an urban environment, and demonstrates that solving environmental problems requires blending diverse conceptual, political, epistemological and technological approaches. A course on sustainable community action As we allow ourselves to feel our pain for the world, we find our connection with each other. (Macy 1983)

At Swarthmore College I teach in the Environmental Studies Programme through the Lang Center for Civic and Social R ­ esponsibility (my courses are cross-listed with Political Science, Sociology & Anthro­ pology and Gender & Sexuality Studies). In the fall of 2012, I taught a course called Environmental Justice: Theory and Action, which, like my Urban Ecology course, incorporated community-based learning and action research components. During the semester, the class ‘border crossed’ into nearby Chester, Pennsylvania, on a ‘toxic tour’ led by local environmental justice activists. Much like the Ambos Nogales tour at the US–Mexico border I had experienced many years earlier,

di chiro  |   227 on this tour my students and I learned the environmental history of Chester’s blighted urban landscape (Cole and Foster 2001) as we walked along the ‘fence line’ separating the Convanta Resource Recovery Facility (the largest solid waste incinerator in the country) from residential neighbourhoods, smelled the pungent odours of several medical waste and sludge treatment facilities, and talked with local activists who are trying to raise awareness and bring about change. As I settle into my new home in the Delaware river watershed in the mid-Atlantic region of the USA, I am now building relationships and working with activists from the Delaware County (DelCo) Alliance for Environmental Justice12 and Chester Green (a new eco-justice organization started by local youth activists and focusing on education, community gardens and sustainability), developing collaborations to support environmental workforce development/green jobs in the solid waste industry (zero waste, composting/sustainable recycling, sustainable manufacturing).13 Bridge-building with local activists to traverse the academia–­ community divide is a central part of my embodied ecology, as is collaborating with other interdisciplinary scholars with mutual in­ terests. Meetings over coffee with my Swarthmore College colleague, Scott Gilbert, discussing his new work on multi-species symbiosis as the core driver of biological evolution and mine on grassroots eco-­cosmopolitics, led to a networking meeting with O, a community ­activist from an environmental justice community in North Philadelphia. O had ­earlier been enrolled as a non-traditional student in Scott’s course on Developmental Biology through her affiliation with the Pendle Hill Quaker Center’s community outreach programme. In our conversations about her work on restorative justice and communitybuilding with the local faith community in North Philadelphia, she outlined her plans to develop ‘community healing’ and capacity-building programmes for Serenity House, a community ministry and outreach centre supported by the United Methodist Church, which ‘serves and provides a sanctuary for the social, spiritual, and human development needs of the predominantly low-income African American residents of our local neighborhoods in North Philadelphia, some of the more economically and environmentally distressed neighborhoods in the city’.14 O and other community members said that the environmental justice framework I was describing resonated with their vision for Serenity House, and we discussed how we could build a productive

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partnership at this ‘small place’ (Kincaid 1988), joining together the goals of community healing, regeneration and ‘just’ sustainability.

Notes on the Sustainable Community Action Research Assemblage: January 2013–June 2014  In December 2012, a group of environmental studies students approached me with an interest in designing an independent study course focused on environmental justice and community organizing, which they called ‘Sustainable Community Action’. The students worked with me to develop a syllabus with readings on decolonial research methodologies, environmental justice and critical sustainability, and we then met with O at Serenity House to begin a conversation and a partnership. The students invited O and other community residents to offer suggestions for additional readings and to participate in our discussions and interrogations of the false, yet persistent, dichotomies between environment and community and theory and practice. While visiting Serenity House, the students toured the surrounding neighbourhood, surveyed the backyard of the house imagining a vegetable garden, and climbed on to the roof of the garage to investigate the possibilities of installing a green roof. Our emerging action research group started to make a list of other people who should be at the table and who should be part of our initial conversations and planning steps. We decided to organize a community dinner to bring together North Philly residents and Swarthmore College students to collect people’s thoughts and concerns about their community. Some of the ‘paw-fulls’ of dirt we gathered, which we hoped would provide the fertile soil to cultivate action, include: Serenity House is a special, beloved place in the neighbourhood; the community struggles with the social and environmental ‘wounds’ of homelessness, unemployment, drug and alcohol abuse, gun and gang violence, poor health, racism, gentrification and deteriorating schools; the mission of the organization is healing, community regeneration and building a healthy, thriving future for our children.

Creating action research assemblages: a new spelling of sustain­ability Throughout the spring semester of 2013, the students in the Sustainable Community Action course co-produced a feminist-environmental justice syllabus supporting lively action research assemblages and a ‘new spelling’ of sustainability in North Philadelphia. Throughout the semester, the students worked with me to collaborate with com-

di chiro  |   229 munity leaders and residents, to outreach to local master gardeners and academic researchers, to recruit their peers from the college to come to North Philly to help with workdays, and to secure funding from the Arch Street United Methodist Church, Swarthmore College and the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society to design and build a community garden on the organization’s lot. As the action research assemblage (the ‘team’) expanded and the discussions on what sustainability looks like in an environmental justice community such as North Philadelphia deepened, Serenity House leaders O and Wilhemina, and the members of the organization’s men’s and women’s support groups, began to envision even greater opportunities for this ‘small place’ in the ’hood. In the spirit of Teresa Leal’s seres puentes, our team regularly border-crossed, meeting both at the Serenity House in Philly and at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, sharing our differently situated theories of social justice and social transformation. Together we read Jamaica Kincaid’s powerful essay A Small Place (1988), which tells the story of British colonialism’s devastating effects on the peoples and environments of her small island nation, Antigua, and how part of the struggle against this brutal colonial legacy was to reclaim one’s sense of identity and ‘sense of place’. Delving into the connections between identity and place, the Serenity House organizers contemplated the following possibilities. Could the Serenity House community garden eventually support a food co-op and a community café? Could the detached garage in the backyard be retrofitted to house a green roof or a rooftop garden to grow vegetables, herbs and flowers that could be sold at one of Philadelphia’s farmers’ markets, thereby supporting small-scale entrepreneurship? Could the Serenity Garden be transformed into a space to offer community workshops, skills training and youth programming on organic agriculture, composting, seed saving, beekeeping and showcasing local African-American food cultures and heritages to advance food sovereignty? Could our ‘small place’ create opportunities for adults and young people and generate a thriveable model for a more just sustainability? To respond to these big questions and bold visions, the students set out on a series of action research projects mobilizing expertise from diverse faculty members (environmental science, engineering, urban planning, sociology) and facilities managers (organic groundskeeping, horticulture, energy efficiency and buildings, green roofs, sustainable design) at Swarthmore College and Drexel University in Philadelphia,

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and developed a community handbook to provide information and resources on the social and environmental benefits that ‘sustainability’ initiatives like green roofs or renewable energy installations could offer the organization. The team organized several community dinners, listening and story circles, and community gatherings bringing residents, friends, young people and allies together to theorize change, to paint flowerpots, to till the soil, to plant a garden, to share stories of loss, grief and renewal, and to think about resilience in the face of climate change (including stories of how people coped during the power outages that befell the neighbourhood during Hurricane Sandy in October 2012). With the objective of sustaining these relationships and expanding the action research assemblage, I offered the second version of the Sustainable Community Action course in the 2013/14 academic year, engaging another round of students. O and I met with the new crop of students (and some alumni from the earlier course) and with a group of engineering professors who offered to assess the structural integrity of Serenity House’s garage to determine its capacity to support a green roof/rooftop garden. The ‘three engineers’ (as I referred to them) brought their en­ gineer’s tools for the job to North Philly and conducted a battery of measurements and evaluations, eventually determining that the garage would require extensive and expensive structural reinforcements to withstand the weight of a green roof. One engineering professor was so intrigued by talking with residents who were excited about the benefits of energy efficiency that he suggested instead installing solar panels on the garage roof to power an outdoor charging station for cell phones, iPads, outdoor lights and stereo systems in the Serenity Garden. Enthusiastic about the prospect of solar panels at Serenity  House, neighbourhood residents imagined this proposition as a scalable idea in support of climate justice: as climate chaos worsens, Serenity House could reduce its use of fossil fuel energy and, in the face of future outages, would be able to provide community residents with access to renewable, solar-powered electricity. In addition to using the tools of engineering to promote just sustainability projects, another important tool required of an embodied ecological practice is storytelling. Stories told by members of marginalized communities disrupt official histories of modern development as progress (such as in Kincaid’s renarrativizing of the

di chiro  |   231 legacies of colonialism in the Caribbean) and instead help to remember the lived realities of a community’s experiences of social and environmental injustice (Dickinson 2012). ‘To value people’s stories is healing,’ explained O in a conversation at Serenity House. ‘And it’s transformative; it interrupts the power dynamics of people who are disposable. No, these stories are not disposable; they are necessary for life.’15 The student action researchers helped organize ‘story circles’ on environmental justice and sustainability with O and other leaders at Serenity House. The participants in a story circle with the men’s support group (a group of neighbourhood men who struggle with substance abuse, anger management, homelessness and unemployment) decided together that they wanted to plant a butterfly garden, some recounting stories of the gardens their grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts and uncles (many having migrated to Pennsylvania from the southern states of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi) would tend in the backyards or in vacant lots in the city. The men all reflected on how butterflies bring beauty and joy to the neighbourhood and that they are essential to the neighbourhood’s urban ecology in their role as pollinators. The excitement generated from the talk of a butterfly garden was matched by that of the possible installation of solar panels on the garage roof: ‘Bringing solar panels to Serenity House would help our children learn how to be on the cutting edge of this new revolution. Sustainability will also be a part of our kids’ future.’16 As in the Urban Ecology course/action research assemblage in Holyoke, Massachusetts, the participants in Sustainable Community Action, the growing collaborative in the Delaware river watershed’s bio-social region, are engaging head-on with the intersections of social, cultural, economic and ecological injustices; they are directly experiencing that, in Haraway’s words, ‘there will be no nature without justice. Nature and justice, contested discursive objects embodied in the material world, will become extinct or survive together’ (1992: 311). Epilogue: storms and peace As I was writing the final sections of this chapter, a powerful nor’easter storm packing gale-force winds and heavy snowfall had shut down most of the mid-Atlantic and New England coastal regions of the United States. Worse still, this late-winter storm – aka Winter Storm Pax (Latin: peace) – had also resulted in the cancelling of an

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event honouring Black History Month (commemorated in the USA in February) that I had long awaited: a conversation among three prominent African-American feminists, Toni Morrison, Sonia Sanchez and Bernice Johnson Reagon. The disappointment of missing out on occasions to hear inspiring speakers owing to storm-related cancellations is certainly not the worst of the problems that can be anticipated and to which the world will need to adapt as global warming becomes increasingly manifest, but I had looked forward to hearing Bernice Johnson Reagon, writer, performer and founder of the singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock, whose songwriting, scholarship and activism had long forged connections between feminism and environmental justice, and had deeply influenced my own work in the field. As the storm raged, I pondered the connections between Winter Storm Pax, climate change and environmental justice, bringing to mind Bernice Johnson Reagon’s song about the remarkable civil rights leader Ella Baker. In ‘Ella’s Song’ (performed by Sweet Honey in the Rock), Reagon put to music Baker’s powerful words denouncing the brutality of Jim Crow America and condemning the country’s indifference to the killing and everyday violence against African American children and youth. Quoting Baker, Reagon wrote these lyrics: ‘Until the killing of black men, black mothers’ sons, is as important as the killing of white men, white mothers’ sons / We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes’ (‘Ella’s Song’, Bernice Johnson Reagon, 1983). The fundamental critique of US racism expressed in Baker’s words, and her staunch commitment to intergenerational justice and to young people’s active involvement in the struggle for a ‘sustainable’ future, is, I think, at the heart of the movement for environmental justice, and more recently of the climate justice movement. Much of my own work on and understanding of the connections between environmental justice theory and feminist politics were inspired by this analysis of the multiple dangers to children’s lives and futures in an uneven and unequal world, the devastation wrought by what feminist geographer Cindi Katz calls the ‘scoured landscape of social reproduction’ (2008). As the effects of climate chaos are felt differently around the globe, this landscape becomes ever more precarious. Although Ella Baker’s words were referring to a different expression of bodily violence (lynchings, beatings, police brutality), the risks to the health and futures of marginalized communities as a result of environmental degradation and the devastations of climate change

di chiro  |   233 are also forms of violence (a storm named Pax notwithstanding) largely invisible to the dominant culture in the USA, and experienced disproportionately by the most vulnerable communities around the world. These invisible and less spectacular displays of violence, what eco-critic Rob Nixon (2011) terms ‘slow violence’, encompass the scarred landscape of social reproduction, the threats to everyday life faced by many communities: poverty and hunger, the school-to-prison pipeline whereby one out of three black youth will be in jail rather than finish school or attend college, and the high rates of childhood asthma and other diseases from living in deteriorating neighbourhoods contaminated by polluted air, water and toxic environments. Such slower forms of violence affect millions of people every day, but images of this violence don’t show up in the media, on the nightly news or on the agendas of the mainstream, and much more visible, environmental and sustainability movements worldwide. This critical analysis of the disinvestments in social reproduction and the life-and-death threats to African-American, Latino and Native American communities and their capacities to survive and to create sustainable futures was earlier produced by many women leaders of the environmental justice movement in the 1980s and 1990s (Krauss 2009; Di Chiro 1996). Women activists from marginalized commun­ ities have long fought for their rights to the social repro­ duction of life (bodily, economic, environmental and spiritual) and have deeply inspired my own commitments to produc­ing more embodied ­approaches to environmental studies. Challenging the slow violence and environmental injustices that afflict the neighbourhoods served by Nuestras Raíces in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and Serenity House in North Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is at the core of our teams’ critical approaches to ‘sustainability’ and engaged action research/ feminist-environmentalist assemblages. As I dig into my new job and my new home, I imagine the myriad possibilities for ‘sustainable community action’ in Philadelphia and Delaware County, Pennsylvania, as my students and I work together at Serenity House to ‘stay with the trouble’ and to cultivate a new cosmopolitics unfolding on this small section of the turtle shell. I think about Bernice Johnson Reagon’s poignant lyrics in ‘Ella’s Song’ as I reflect on O’s comments on shared response-ability and the creation of lively action research assemblages in this small place:

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Working together with the men and women at Serenity House, I have experienced the depth of sadness in seeing the toll taken on a community long underserved, under-resourced, and, I would even say, discarded by the mainstream society. The tragic effects of this history of racial and economic marginalization include struggles with all forms and manifestations of violence. Our residents experience and struggle with homelessness, long-term unemployment, substance abuse, and daily experiences with the ravages of violence in all its forms (domestic violence, gun violence, police violence, economic violence, environmental deterioration). Through processes of healing and restoration, we strive to bring to light the gifts, talents and creative abilities of our residents. Through our connections with the Swarthmore team, we have put into action many projects that inspire dignity, pride and purpose to our community, and they help us see and build connections between the terrible violence done to our people and to our Earth. Through these projects supporting and caring for the community, for sustainability, and for environmental justice, we aim to heal ourselves and the environment around us.17

Notes 1  In connecting social, economic and cultural issues with environmental ones, the environmental justice movement is redefining and, in fact, reconfiguring a new understanding of humans and their environments and developing more integrative theories and methods of environmental studies. The environmental justice movement has brought awareness of environmental problems as they disproportionately affect low-income and poor populations, and especially African-American, Latino, Native American and Asian-Pacific communities in the USA. The environ­ mental justice framework also analyses the unevenly distributed social and environmental costs of global industrial development that are shouldered by poor communities in the global South. See Clapp (2001); Steady (2009); Carmin

and Agyeman (2011). The environmental justice movement also produces innova­ tive ideas to promote sustainable com­ munities and, consequently, changes the way we think about our relationship to each other and to the non-human world. Understanding the state of the natural environment as profoundly linked with the health status and economic security of their communities, activists in the environmental justice movement resist the metaphorical and material partition­ ing of their bodies and lived experiences from the environments in which they live. 2  For example, see Sessions (1996/1997). 3  In her article ‘Melancholy natures, queer ecologies’, Catriona MortimerSandilands explores the experiences of woundedness and melancholia as a

di chiro  |   235 ‘psychic state of being that holds the possibility for memory’s transformation into ethical and political environmental reflection’ that may create the con­ ditions for coalition-building and action (Mortimer-Sandilands 2010). 4  ‘The percentage of Americans who are ‘alarmed’ about climate change and motivated to do something about it in­ creased to 16% between 2010 and 2012.’ From the ‘Six Americas Survey’ con­ ducted since 2008 by researchers at Yale and George Mason Universities. Lauren Morello, ‘Concern over climate change grows, poll finds’, www.climatecentral. org/news/concern-over-climate-changegrows-poll-finds-15698. 5  Founded in 2012 and led by women, the social movement and uprisings by First Nations peoples in Canada against the Harper govern­ ment’s r­ esource exploitation on native territories, abrogation of treaties and threats to native sovereignty. 6  The Quebec Student Movement’s brandishing of the red square, which derives from the condition of being ‘carrément dans le rouge/squarely in the red’, symbolizes the Canadian student campaigns against rising debt and their demands for free education for all. 7  Energy Action Coalition is the ‘hub of the youth climate movement’ and the national organizer of PowerShift. See www.energyactioncoalition.org. 8  For more of a detailed history, see the organization’s website, www. nuestras-raices.org, and its Facebook page. Also see Kleindienst (2007) for a detailed history of the organization’s origins and programmes. 9  Hampshire College, Amherst Col­ lege, University of Massachusetts, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College and Holyoke Community College. 10  See the company’s website (www. energiaus.com). 11  At this writing, the AHH! co­

alition’s bilingual grassroots organizers have convinced the corporate giant GDF-Suez (the owners of the Mt Tom coal plant) to retire its Holyoke facility within the next few years. They have also transformed the racial-ethnic make-up of the city government, helped elect a pro-environmental justice Latino representative from Holyoke to the Massachusetts statehouse, and secured funding from the Massachusetts Department of Energy and Environment to plan for the sustainable reuse and redevelopment of the coal plant site. Author’s interview, Lena Entin, AHH!, N2N, 22 April 2014. 12  Formerly Chester Residents Concerned for Quality of Life. DelCo Alliance for Environmental Justice, www. ejnet.org/chester/. 13  This includes collaborating on grant writing for new EPA programmes that extend the definition of ‘green jobs’ into other sectors besides energy conservation and green construction. The new EPA green jobs training grants are for workforce training in solid waste management, water treatment, hazardous waste management and infrastructure development for climate change adaptation. 14  Author’s interview, O, 24 January 2014. 15  Interview with O, by Swarthmore student Kathryn Wu, 19 April 2014. 16  Author’s interview, Brother John, 19 April 2014. 17  Author’s interview, O, 24 January 2014.

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and the Politics of Empowerment, New York: Psychology Press. Di Chiro, G. (1996) ‘Nature as com­ munity: the convergence of environ­ ment and social justice’, in W. Cronon (ed.), Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, New York: Norton. — (2003) ‘Beyond ecoliberal “common futures”: toxic touring, environ­ mental justice, and a trans­communal ­politics of place’, in D. Moore, J. Kosek and A. Pandian (eds), Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference, Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press. — (2006) ‘Environmental studies and the pedagogy of intersectionality: teaching urban ecology’, Feminist Teacher, 16(2). — (2008) ‘Living environmentalisms: coalition politics, social reproduc­ tion, and environmental justice’, Environmental Politics, 17(1): 276–98. — (2013) ‘Climate justice now! Imagin­ ing grassroots ecocosmopolitanism’, in J. Adamson and K. Ruffin (eds), American Studies, Ecocriticism, and Citizenship, New York: Routledge. Dickinson, E. (2012) ‘Addressing environ­ mental racism through storytelling’, Communication, Culture, & Critique, 5: 57–74. Gibson-Graham, J. K., J. Cameron and S. Healy (2013) Take Back the Eco­ nomy: An Ethical Guide for Transform­ ing Our Communities, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gottlieb, R. and A. Joshi (2010) Food Justice, Cambridge: MIT Press. Hales, C. (2008) Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activ­ ist Scholarship, Berkeley: University of California Press. Haraway, D. (1991) ‘Otherworldly conver­ sations: terran topics, local terms’, Science as Culture, 3(1): 64–98. — (1992) ‘The promises of monsters:

di chiro  |   237 a regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others’, in L. Gross­ berg, C. Nelson and P. Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge. — (2007) When Species Meet, Min­ neapolis: University of Minnesota Press. — (2013) ‘Multispecies cosmopolitics: staying with the trouble’, Institute for Humanities Research Distinguished Lecture, Institute for Humanities Research, Arizona State University, 22 March. Hofrichter, R. (ed.) (2000) Reclaiming the Environmental Debate: The Politics of Health in a Toxic Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press hooks, b. (2003) Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, New York: Routledge. Katz, C. (2008) ‘Bad elements: Katrina and the scoured landscape of social reproduction’, Gender, Place and Culture, 15: 115–29. Kincaid, J. (1988) A Small Place, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Klein, N. (2013) ‘Dancing the world into being: a conversation with Idle No More’s Leanne Simpson’, Yes! maga­ zine, 5 March, www.yesmagazine. org/peace-justice/dancing-theworld-into-being-a-conversationwith-idle-no-more-leanne-simpson. Kleindienst, P. (2007) The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture, and Sus­ tainability in the Gardens of Ethnic America, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Krauss, C. (2009) ‘Mothering at the crossroads: African American women and the emergence of the movement against environmental racism’, in P. C. Steady (ed.), Environmental Justice in the New Millennium: Global Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity, and Human Rights, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

LaDuke, W. (1999) All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life, Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Macy, J. (1983) Despair and Per­ sonal P ­ ower in the Nuclear Age, ­Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers. Mortimer-Sandilands, C. (2010) ‘Mel­ ancholy natures, queer ecologies’, in C. Mortimer-Sandilands and B. ­Erickson (eds), Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, Bloom­ ington: Indiana University Press. Nixon, R. (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. O’Brien, M. (1999) ‘Racing towards the starting line: the radical nature of precaution’, Presentation for the Massachusetts Breast Cancer Co­alition, Boston, MA, 23 October, www.healthytomorrow.org/pdf/ racing.pdf. Pellow, D. and R. Brulle (eds) (2005) Power, Justice and the Environment: A Critical Appraisal of the Environ­ mental Justice Movement, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sessions, G. (1996/1997) ‘Reinventing nature: the end of wilderness?’, Wild Earth, 6(4), Winter. Smith, B. (ed.) (1983) Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, New York: Kitchen Table Press. Snow, C. P. (2001 [1959]) The Two Cul­ tures, London: Cambridge University Press. Steady, P. C. (ed.) (2009) Environmental Justice in the New Millennium: Global Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity, and Human Rights, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Walsh, C. (2011) ‘Afro and indigenous life – visions in/and politics: (de)colonial perspectives in Bolivia and Ecuador’, Bolivian Studies Journal, 18: 47–67.

8 | THE SLIPS AND SLIDES OF TRYING TO LIVE FEMINIST POLITICAL ECOLOGY

Wendy Harcourt

Ontological politics As a feminist writing consciously from the ‘personal is political’ I feel I cannot ignore my experiences and emotions and what I have learnt from trying to live ‘otherwise’. I write from a deep sense of crisis as I search to understand the complex interlinkages of gender, environment, cultures and economies ‘in place’ and on my skin. In building this analysis I query my own experience of how responsibly I have lived and shared the environment with others as I reflect on how my intensely felt personal experiences impact (or not) and connect (or not) to others. I write today perturbed by the talk about something called ‘climate’ that we cannot fathom as computers spew out predictions of more crisis and we now see that the new normal is rain, fire, storms and drought. We speak of our guilt and of nature’s revenge. I wonder what are the right imaginaries to understand what is happening to our world? How we experience the environment is relational. It changes over our lifetimes; it depends from where we are viewing it in complex ways. I grew up in Australia where the predominant imagery of environment in my schoolbooks came from English hedgerows, burbling brooks, daffodils in spring and rolling green hills. My family distinguished between ‘natives’ and English flowers in our gardens, the latter being more prized and more familiar in terms of what we understood a garden to be. Walks in our environs, the bush, were uncomfortable affairs, with dangerous insects, snakes and fauna and flora, of most of which we did not know the names. When I visited England I was somewhat relieved to find that there nature fitted my storybooks and the poetry I was taught. Pansies grew in the garden of our rented English house. In my Adelaide home, in the driest state of the driest continent, pansies did not survive.

harcourt  |   239 As a teenager I learnt to love the far north of our state with another family that used to visit the vastness of worn ancient hills as far removed from the city life as the old third-hand car would take us. We would sleep under the stars, and ignore the snake trails around our sleeping bags in the morning. The droughts that hit the sheep farms out there meant we carried our water with us. I learnt a new respect for broad Australian landscapes and felt the beauty of the red hills against the blue sky. These environments I knew as a child felt navigable. The blue planet, the Earth that on one day during my primary school years could now be seen from the moon, could be embraced, could be travelled, could be known; it was there for humanity to explore and live. But now as I write, that once knowable blue planet Earth seems to be dissolving into a giant unpredictable future climate that is not promising to be kind. How do you view the beauties of nature, the majesty of a tall tree, the ripple of light across a deep blue lake, when from all sides the catastrophe of climate crisis screams at you? Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour question how we view such troubles when: one, you simultaneously feel that they might disappear; when, two, you might be responsible for their disappearance; while, three, you feel doubly guilty for not feeling responsible; and given that you sense a fourth level of responsibility for not having dug deeply enough into what is called the ‘climate controversy’. Not read enough, not thought enough, not felt enough. (Latour 2011)

As Latour argues, from ordinary citizens to scientists we all hold a ‘limited local’ view: no one sees the Earth globally and no one sees an ecological system from Nowhere, the scientist no more than the citizen, the farmer or the ecologist – or, lest we forget, the earthworm. Nature is no longer what is embraced from a far away point of view where the observer could ideally jump to see things ‘as a whole’, but the assemblage of contradictory entities that have to be composed together. (Ibid.)

In dealing with the limitations of the local, I see the importance of engaging with others, networking among those contradictory entities,

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making connections and sharing responsibilities. As Latour suggests, networks allow reality to be less about territorial boundaries and states and more about connection and flow. Networks are able to redistribute and reallocate action so that ‘universality is now fully localizable’. Change is happening via ‘instabilities that flow down the global networks of finance, tourism, information, military power, and terrorism’. Change is also happening via networks that build solidarity, support and creativity. As part of these flows in our interacting global networks, our analysis is ‘an alternative, complex and performative sense of social inquiry’. As we write we create what we describe as reality. We are part of local views that flow through connections to global networks, but these connections are mediated by a racial and classbased geopolitics that allows only some to feel engaged and empowered to join the global networks while others feel and can be excluded. As I write about my own experience of living feminist political ecology I am aware of being one of those middle-class intellectuals who travel, engage and are part of the privileged circuits of capitalism. There are others whose bodies, ideas, histories and cultures are extracted, pirated and exploited and brought into those networked circuits in different, more violent ways. These are realities that haunt and inform my own experience, that make me falter and question how best I can take up my responsibilities. So the reality I write about in this chapter is based on the inbetween experiences of feminist political ecology (FPE), my engagement in networks, my struggle for connections, the slips and slides between one place and another. It is also about my engagement with multiple realities that I sometimes feel are contradictory and difficult and where the ‘I’ feels misplaced. Like Haraway (2007), I want to stay with the troubles I have felt in different places and times, and like Latour to investigate ‘the chaotic, the complex and with the emotional … the pleasures and pains that follow the movement and displacement of people, objects, information, and ideas’ (Latour 2011). I take up Latour’s invitation to engage in this ‘ontological politics’. That is, to try to make a difference by writing about FPE in ways that can help shape new realities, finding tools for understanding and practising the complex and the elusive. This means to be uncomfortable about what I write, to try to alter academic habits and to move in and beyond old categories of what is gender, what is environment, what is place and what is political.

harcourt  |   241 In this chapter I explore what FPE has meant to me over time. I move between the theory and the practice that has informed the emotional engagements, frustrations and hopes about my engagement in feminism, environment and justice movements. I base the narrative around three snapshots that have helped to define my FPE experience: one as a feminist activist in my early twenties involved in the anti-nuclear and environmental feminist movements in Australia in the early 1980s, the second as a European-based feminist advocate in the early 1990s engaging in the UN debates around sustainable development, and the third as an activist academic in the early 2010s contributing to a small community-based environmental group in rural Lazio, Italy. From where do I speak? I need first to situate myself as a white Australian-born cis-woman living in Europe (I commute between Rome and Bolsena in Italy and The Hague, the Netherlands). While living for years in European countries and working in international environments, I continue to be influenced by my home country. I could refer here to many influences, but let me just mention the brilliant political work, fiction and performance of Australian academics such as Peter Read writing on place at the University of Sydney and Deborah Bird Rose working for the Centre for Research on Social Inclusion at Macquarie University, Sydney. These narratives recognize the violence of Australian colonial history; acknowledge the complexity of 45,000 years of indigenous cultures, divergent understandings of land, time and spirituality; and attempts in the last two centuries to deal with the overexploitation of waters, minerals and soils. The last decade in Australia has seen a reclaiming of the diversity that makes up Australia and in particular the long and unfinished process of reconciliation of white and black Australia (Harcourt 2001). In writing about belonging and place in Australia, Read (2000) confronts the racism of rural Anglo-Celtic Australians. He speaks of how the contestation between different understandings of place needs to be articulated in order for a new sense of Australia to emerge; one that combines different cultural understandings of place, acknow­ ledging the profound power imbalances, and learning to care for the land materially and spiritually. Bird Rose in her long-term research with indigenous Australians

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explores how social and ecological justice are entwined as Aboriginal philosophy is brought into conversation with Western philosophy. As she says, she ‘started with philosophical questions, but it became clear that the answers were all about country, about place, other ­living beings, relationships, and responsibilities’ (2004). She asks: ‘how can we inscribe a moral presence for ourselves in countries we have occu­pied through violence? How can our love find forms of expression which remember the past and at the same time work toward justice?’ These analyses speak to my emotions and frustrations with the sense of being the other, not belonging to my country, not understanding enough of the different cultures and environments of what it means to be Australian and of my struggle to speak ‘otherwise’. As an adult I discovered the histories I learnt were untrue to the peoples and to the environment I had grown up in. I discovered the pastures of grazing sheep across the road of my Adelaide home were really wetlands, the river that ran along the town had been a sacred ground for indigenous people, the majority of whom had died with the first encounters in the 1850s, those who survived being harassed and killed as white people moved inwards from the coast. Instead of being a citizen of a lucky country, I uncovered deep racism, sexism, colonialism and exploitation of natural resources and people. I saw Australian culture through other eyes, not as a brief history of white adventurers in a forbidding landscape barely marked by primitive, ‘prehistorical’ indigenous knowledge, but a complex vast land that was known through sophisticated languages, full of meaning and beauty, which was now scarred by the suffering and decimation of peoples in the name of modern development. These writings by Read and Bird Rose are part of a situated knowledge that helps provide new ways and tools for describing the ways the connections and networks work. How to live with whiteness and privilege, understand other peoples, other local views that share your own place, to think of how non-humans situate us in the environment we share with them. How can we move to a deeper sense of situated knowledge where the unspoken is also part of the connection, moving us beyond what we see and speak. There is a real awkwardness in writing and speaking about others, even if there is, alongside the writing, the doing, the activism and engagement. There are frictions about who writes about what, in what language, and who benefits? Do you stay quiet and on the sidelines

harcourt  |   243 or do you keep writing, positioning yourself as an ally, acknowledging tensions and the messiness of it all? Privilege can mean not knowing, and letting go – respecting the space for others to know. One reason why I left Australia is because I felt I could not know how to be ‘otherwise’ in Australia (Harcourt 2001). The willingness to stay and trouble is not easy – it means accepting the otherness in us and the others we were not brought up to love, enduring the violence that racism and difference cause, seeing the violence both ways – for yourself and others. When I visit Australia I see how my family, friends and former colleagues have moved with the difficult issues, the frictions and possibilities of initiatives that work on respecting cultures otherwise.1 If our knowledge and culture give meaning to our bodies, our actions and interactions, and the world around us, what do these writings do to my sense of responsibility, of sharing and connection with others? And to return to my opening concern about climate, how does this history connect to the technospeak of climate change? How do the popular images of crisis, the apologies for the past, the ordinary everyday continuities of suffering and loss among indigenous people, link to the predominantly Western knowledge, the ‘hard’ and scientific language of numbers and predictions? Do I believe that science and indigenous cultures are no longer at loggerheads? What sort of hybrid does that embrace breed? How do such encounters (past and present) among cultures recognize how to live alongside and within and embrace the land as a spiritual living being? With those questions in mind, let me turn to my three stories. Feminist environmental activism in Australia The first is my engagement in gender and environmental issues in Australia in the early 1980s. I was part of a social feminist collective which gained some notoriety by travelling to different sites in our jointly owned rickety VW campervan. We were part of campaigns to blockade loggers and dams on the Franklin river in Tasmania, to stop mining of Roxby Downs in South Australia, prevent the US military from entering Pine Gap US weapons base in central Australia, and occupy the Australian parliament to give back Uluru to indigenous owners. Alongside our environmental movement campaigns we also held protests to stop harassment of lesbians and gays, to end violence against women, and for abortion rights. Body politics – violence

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against women, lesbian and gay rights (as it was called back then) – were interlaced with environmentalism and anti-racism along with a strong political and economic critique of the state and capitalism. We assumed that women’s autonomy, integrity and sexual rights were part and parcel of defending natural resources, collective ownership and justice of all kinds. This story illustrates how different environmental economic and feminist issues were tightly interlinked. It was not always comfortable or easy. We had rules of inclusion and exclusion for different spaces. In some only women were allowed, sometimes hetero-women were excluded, in others women and men allowed, and in other spaces sexual orientation was expected to be invisible. Blacks were a minority in those spaces. When we were working in environmental movements we were very noticed as a ‘women only’ group in environmental meetings that were held in consensus-building style. We would sit in circles to come to a consensus on whatever decision was to be made (where to do sit-ins, which strategies, etc.). In such a consensusmaking process the speakers were inevitably men, so members of my small collective would sit in different parts of the circle and encourage each other to take the space to speak. The connections with others were made through direct actions. We lived in Canberra, the capital of Australia, and therefore where many activists gathered. This proximity to governmental power allowed us direct access to unions, political parties, national media and parliament. As many of the campaigns were nationwide, we would take turns to travel to actions, conventions and working groups of different political campaigns interstate. Connections were also global – using chains of connections that allowed us to send messages sometimes by post and other times from hand to hand, through radio connections and occasional phone calls to people working on similar campaigns. For example, we organized with other Australians a protest against Pine Gap (a US weapons base in central Australia) with the support of British women who were at Greenham Common (a US weapons base in the UK). There were a lot of meetings, including our own. Our collective’s consensus-building could be tough given our different identities (classbased and sexual orientation), histories (country or town education) and occupations (nurses, carpenters, archivists and admin – I was the only student). Everyone worked but me, so we would meet in the

harcourt  |   245 evenings and most of our public actions happened on the weekends and people skived off work (me off writing the thesis) to participate in actions. It was a heady time given that we adopted direct action as our main strategy. We spoke a lot about not being co-opted by the system. I had a lot to explain away given that I was doing a PhD at the Australian National University. We talked a lot about ‘burnout’ – we were very committed and young enough to have the energy to be engaged on dozens of issues. We thought to avoid burnout by pooling resources (according to our incomes) and going on breaks to enjoy the mountains, the rivers and the sea. Inevitably, burnout did catch us, and after four intense years the collective ended. Some stayed in Canberra, I moved to Europe, one moved to central Australia and others back to rural towns. Burnout is a nasty business – I experienced it in waves of despair and crying fits, the inability to eat, a total nervous exhaustion and inability to reach out to others or acknowledge that I was no longer coping until blackouts forced me to see I had to move on. Global environmental activism at the UN The second story is my entry point into international gender and development advocacy through the 1990s United Nations summits and intergovernmental conferences on a series of development issues, the first of which I attended as a non-governmental organization (NGO) delegate in Rio de Janeiro at the Earth Summit – the UN Conference on Environment and Development in 1992. There were other conferences held on human rights (Vienna, 1993), social development (Copenhagen, 1994), population (Cairo, 1994), women (Beijing, 1995), habitat (Istanbul, 1996) and food (Rome, 1996) (Dankelman 2012). The meetings for me were an unexpected foray into the global world of development – variously qualified as human-centred, sustainable, people-centred, environmentally sound development. There are different ways that NGOs engage in these events. Some are officially members of delegations or have status that allows them to be in the same buildings as government representatives and to be part of the negotiating process. Another is to be part of alternative events that happen in the same city, often at great distance from the official meeting. People attending those produce documents or perform protests that try to counter official processes. Some participate in both

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spaces, meeting where they can outside large UN conference rooms and in UN basements to debate texts. Because of the status of my institution, I was able to gain easy entry into UN premises – this was pre-9/11 and the very early days of global civil society networking, so there was less security and not so many people attending. I could get into negotiating rooms to speak to official government delegates and be a useful part of the women’s advocacy caucuses. We felt caught up in a machinery of endless meetings and also a sense in the early 1990s of historical relevance and importance, with the fall of the Berlin wall, the end of the Cold War and talk of a peace dividend. There were a lot of uncomfortable moments in those UN halls, not the least being the sense of co-optation and silencing that went on regarding who could speak and represent whom. What I want to highlight here is that within all of the contradictions that such processes present, the networking and engagement of the progressive women’s groups created for me, and many others, a very powerful sense of connection and sharing of responsibility. I felt this in the first global women’s meeting I attended in 1991 at the World Women’s Congress for a Healthy Planet in Miami. This was a very powerful meeting of 1,000 women from around the world2 who ‘held witness to the damage being done to Mother Earth due to patriarchy, capitalism and colonial history’ (Harcourt and Escobar 2005). The declarations and networking connections made in the ­Miami congress fed directly into the events in Rio, specifically at  the Planeta Femea, the women’s tent in the alternative summit of  the tent city in Flamengo Park, and in the advocacy organized around the official UN summit. Planeta Femea’s strategic positioning at the centre of the tents made visible women’s individual and collective struggles. The Women’s Action Agenda 21 that emerged from the discussions at the Planeta Femea fed directly into the offi­cial Earth Summit Agenda 21 and Rio Declaration. The Women’s Action Agenda put together by women representing different regions and interests expounded holistic principles of global equity, resource ethics and empowerment of women, and demanded a paradigm shift in development. It denounced the development discourse whereby ‘women’ and ‘environment’ are merely technical issues within the overarching goal of economic growth. The text also celebrated women’s creativity and cultural diversity (Dankelman 2012). The text remains for me an eloquent statement for FPE.

harcourt  |   247 Women’s networks were organized around the newly founded Women in Environment Development Organization (ibid.; Harcourt 2009) that instigated the women’s caucus process. Women met each morning, working together on texts, forming allegiances among the government delegations and organizing who would attend which side event in order to hone the messages to be delivered to the government delegations. Women’s caucuses representing different feminist and women’s networks continued in the UN meetings that followed on social development, human rights, population, women, habitat and food. As this siloing of issues suggests, the holistic and critical approach of the Women’s Congress for a Healthy Planet became tempered and eventually lost in the detail and technical negotiation process around official texts. But the networking and solidarity, and discussions among women who became friends in between these processes, became a critical part of my and others’ experience of the transnational feminism that informs FPE. The process around the UN meetings facilitated movement-building and transnational solidarity. The networking in organizing and preparing for these UN events created a sense of shared struggles across state borders, via strategic alliances that negotiated class, race, ethnic, age and sexual differences. Nevertheless, inevitable differences surfaced around the dynamics of class, gender, ethnicity, race and sexuality outside and within feminist movements (see Di Chiro, this volume, on the difficulties of coalitions). Collusions and delusions The UN summits I was attending in the 1990s, starting with the Earth Summit, were part of the negotiations of governments, private sector and civil society defining the environment as something to be brought into sustainable development through a process that many of us called the greening of the economy3 (Harcourt 2012). The ‘Earth Summit’ with its logo and easy-to-remember title can be seen as a turning point in the history of environment and development because it brought together business, government and civil society as the ‘three pillars’ of global sustainable development. On the one hand Rio was an event of celebration. It brought together 17,000 people from different movements, many of whom never thought they could engage in official global environmental or developmental processes (including myself). On the other hand, it was also a moment when

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governments publicly embraced the private sector engagement in the business of environment and development after preparing the ways in the years leading up to the Earth Summit. A small but telling example is that the Earth Summit logo could be used at a small cost by those who wished to brand themselves as officially part of the summit. All those attending could purchase a ‘custom-made’ Earth Summit Swatch with the logo set in clear plastic with a green band, a deal organized by the Swiss-based Business Council for Sustainable Development, which was prominently engaged in the official proceedings, invited and consulted by the head of the official meeting, Maurice Strong. The Earth Summit is an example of how the environment became taken up as a modern subject of neoliberal capitalism (Luke 1999) that situates the individual and the environment at the core of modern systems of state management and governance, security and productivity, captured in the term ‘sustainable development’. Polish feminist Ewa Charkiewicz (2009) describes sustainable development as the process through which governments manage the biosphere and populations as productive forces so that the environment and people are brought into the field of global economic interventions. She describes the process around the Earth Summit in 1992 as ‘global programmes of action’ built on ‘collisions and collusions of global ecology and global economy’. From the 1990s onwards the link between the environment and the business world took on various permeations of green business discourse, the most prominent being ‘corporate environmental responsibility’ as part of the neoliberal capitalism leading up to the Rio+20 ‘green economy’.4 There has since been a lot of cynicism around civil society efforts to attend UN events and also other mega-movement meetings of the World Social Forum. Are they worth participants’ (and protesters’) time? Do they make any difference to the outcome of the negotiations as so many of the decisions are made elsewhere, not in the big official events, but behind closed doors. There is very little that is left to the events themselves, ‘debate’ concerning the key documents focusing on removing brackets, adding phrases and squeezing out real debates and connections. I nevertheless regard these events as important happenings in terms of framing our understanding of global environmental responsibilities. They are key nodes for networking that strengthen local power in ways that extend and transform local or place-based politics and

harcourt  |   249 connections. These events hold a sense of global responsibilities that politicize in innovative ways connections beyond the mainstream policy negotiations. These events and the connections made play an important role in our global imaginary of the environment that can be politicized and understood as something to be fought for and defended, opening up the sense of environment as fluid and political. People engaging in these fora have created a culture of environment that links across boundaries the defence of place in vibrant global networks of connectivity (Escobar 2008). Since Rio, there has been a continual stream of ‘civil society and social movement’ meetings around environment, development and making another world possible, and a series of worldwide ‘collisions and collusions’ that have formed a key backdrop to FPE debates and discussions in transnational feminist movements (Agostino 2015). Twenty years after Rio, when the UN Summit on Sustainable Development was held, I again followed the Rio (+20) debates as they were reported and discussed, but this time I observed via social media – dozens of bloggers and websites of different movements, live-streaming reports by mainstream media as well as emails and tweets from friends who were there. Like thousands of others, I was connected and experienced the disappointment of many people there about the backstage dealings and failures of governments to agree on issues that were about the future we really wanted.5 As I followed events in Rio (through cyberspace), I was physically located in a seventeenth-century convent on the shores of a volcanic lake in Bolsena, Italy. Labours of love in Bolsena, Italy My last story is that of my current political engagement with Punti di Vista (PdiV) (in English ‘Points of View’) that since 1997 has been looking after a 400-year-old Franciscan monastery, the Convento S. Maria del Giglio.6 PdiV is a community-based organization run collectively by a core group of nine women and men. The core group is employed in various paid professions: in academia (in Italy, the USA and the Netherlands), in the Rome-based food agencies (Food and Agricultural Organization and World Food Programme), government environmental services (in central and southern Italy), an international NGO (Pangea, working on gender-based violence), with two members who are retired. Around this group is a global network

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of activists, policy-makers and researchers that use the Convento as a retreat and meeting place on a wide variety of issues – from clown workshops to the politics of food to feminist research on economies, environment and body politics. There are four open days in the year – New Year, Women’s Day, 8 March, Midsummer Day, 15 August, and in October, when people come to pick the olives, and as many people as possible meet to eat together in the walled gardens of the Convento. The Convento has its own organic garden, vineyard and olive trees, as well as goats and chickens, with the aim of being as self-sustaining as possible. At the centre of PdiV is an uneasy balance between what the international knowledge and experience that people from outside bring to PdiV and local realities of running the Convento given the politics of the local town, the governance system in Italy, the Church and local agricultural practices. The workings of the Convento are imbibed with the physical beauty of the place, the struggle to sustain livelihoods and the attempts of the local environmental and slow food movement to battle for sustainable agricultural practices, overlaid by the tourism and history of the town, with Church, state and aristocracy having fought for centuries over ownership of the place. Overfishing, the overflow of waste from caravan parks, speedboats and agricultural chemicals are killing the lake. The national authorities have declared the water unsafe to drink as it has too much arsenic, so that people have to pay for filtered water.7 Negotiating around who decides what happens in Bolsena is a continual struggle between the town hall, governmental committees, the Church and progressive environmental groups. PdiV works with the local women, who have been leading the alternative to mainstream tourism (the caravan parks and speedboats), running the book and coffee shops, ‘eco’ wine bars and ‘bio’ cheese farms, and holding workshops on local food and Etruscan cultures. Defending the environmental and cultural integrity of the lake at Bolsena and the daily fight for the sustainability of its waters, culture and living history are ongoing struggles. Like many of the small alternative groups in the town, PdiV s­ truggles for funds to keep up the physical structure of the Convento. The agreement with the Francescan order allows PdiV usufructuary rights as long as they do the repairs, pay the property taxes and allow pilgrims to stay (there are twenty-five rooms). The amount of administration,

harcourt  |   251 dealings with the Church and local authorities, and local townspeople who look with envy at the size of the place and imagine many other economically profitable uses, are a constant nagging backdrop to the workings of the Convento. The broader political aims are often put to one side in favour of roof repairs, fund-raising to pay the property taxes, and time needed to care for young children and older relatives. Given this context, the importance of the international networking and support for the Convento is palpable. Outsiders bring energy and appreciation, even if they can also miss the everyday grind. Engaging with PdiV has made me far more aware of the underside, so to speak, of FPE in practice – the taken-for-granted practices by others that allow activist research and policy engagement. The discussions of PdiV are tempered by the everyday politics of taking care of family, keeping an ancient building running and sharing tasks so that members of the PdiV collective can continue to engage in political work, in the town and farther afield. This boils down to who provides the food, the care, the love that enable people to meet, act and challenge ‘glocal’ agricultural, economic and cultural practices. Our conversations are often about how to negotiate the moving to and fro from the intimate to the global FPE practices. Our discussion is not only about the funds to enable someone to travel to other places but also who cares for and who is responsible for those left behind. Who will be around at the Convento? How we bring together local and global concerns that inform Convento life translates into how to make meaningful connections between local cheese-makers and local campaigns for slow food and the complexity of EU laws on food and safety and the debates around the green economy going on in Rio (see Wichterich, this volume). These labours of love are keeping the Convento going – with humour and inspiration – but also produce awkward and emotional moments. Being involved in PdiV and wanting to stay involved have given me a sense of how difficult it is to engage in FPE practices if we are to carry out our full responsibilities to others – in this case the beautiful environment of the Convento, the fragility of the lake, the conflictual history of the town, how to live out our collective dream of alternatives, keeping in touch (travelling and working) with the outside, connecting transnationally and translocally, while ensuring the well-being of those we love. Understanding how to value the acts of care and love is part of

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feminist practice and analysis.8 The life of PdiV illustrates that it is not always easy to find the balance. It is difficult to continue active political engagement when someone needs to feed the goats, make sure the garden is watered, open the chapel for pilgrims, look after children, and care for the ageing people in our lives. The way PdiV survives is through the unpaid work of volunteers, particularly those who live almost full time in the Convento, and significantly those with young children, or who are retired. Even though PdiV charges for use of the place by different organizations that share the goals of the Convento, it continues to be reliant on the goodwill of many, and always under the shadow of the uncertainties of the Italian political system. Place-based globalism These three stories are about what I call place-based globalism (Osterweil 2005), whereby feminists work in a ‘glocal’ context (Dirlik 1998). I understand glocal as the combination of local/global whereby global realities are played out in place and where actors bring the concerns and experience of place to events/places that claim global importance, such as the UN, and in so doing transform and shape globalization processes. FPE builds on these stories and analysis of the many places – rooted, networked and connected – of feminist resistance (Rocheleau et al. 1996; see Nightingale, this volume). The larger macro-picture of global economic inequality is contextualized and gendered in these narratives of women ‘in place’. By connecting the local to the global FPE is able to shape an analysis of the global through a nuanced gendered understanding of the interlinkages between body, home, community and natural resources in the public political space. In this sense, place extends beyond the physical presence. Following Massey (1994, 2002), place flows across spatial scales from the body to the household to the community, national and global levels. People negotiate place as they protect and conserve places, enhance and modify places, and create connections with other places at different levels (Harcourt et al. 2013). Place-based globalism is comprised of fluid and diffuse nodes, interconnections and relations that are never totally consolidated into a singular global entity. Their diffuseness and local rootedness increasingly shape globality. Though all three stories are illustrations of place-based globalism,

harcourt  |   253 they are qualitatively different and historically defined. The first was about movement-organizing at a time of life when I, and my companions, were young and relatively unencumbered by personal ­ commitments. Working with our own resources, we were fighting directly (as we saw it) the patriarchal, environmentally destructive capitalist system and racist, sexist, heteronormative (though we did not use the word) institutions of post-colonial global development processes. We were doing our best to work outside the system. There was a strong sense of hope that people could ‘save’ the environment and create a better world outside the capitalist system. As far as we were concerned, alternatives were possible and we were making them. The environment we saw as being still outside economic processes. It was being exploited, like women, like indigenous people. Our responsibility was therefore to defend it, directly. The second, a decade later, was about working within the system through professional negotiations with governments and business that were defining sustainable development as part and parcel of economic growth. The concepts of place and environment in this context were very different; we were no longer able to defend place directly. We connected ‘networked’ different places in order to be part of global negotiations and in this way defeat hegemonic powers that impacted where we were living. We saw the environments where we lived as impacted by global forces and therefore harder to defend directly. In our advocacy and lobbying of the multilateral system we were drawn more into the discourse of globalization, seeking to understand power as diffuse, and the environment as produced and defined by neoliberal capitalist processes. We were engaged in professional processes, and though the personal connections and friendships made were intense and important, it is noticeable that our deeper connections, the love and well-being of others that provided the support for us to travel, were not visible in our ‘professional’ engagements. They were spoken about in the corridors and rooms where we stayed, sharing photos of our loved ones and families. Indeed, it is not until I was engaged with PdiV meeting with others who, like me, were meeting the demands of a long-term relationship and children that I became more aware of how important it was to speak about these labours of love as part of my FPE practice. PdiV continued to be where the global was played out in the local in a rural setting that, although it appears inherently conservative, for me

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has been a site of FPE politics that allowed me to understand ‘on my skin’ how environment is linked to culture through relations of power, agency and responsibility to human and non-human environments. Further wanderings: ecofeminism My engagement with PdiV in Bolsena has evoked a strong spiritual connection not so much with the Etruscan past, nor with the Convento itself with its green-walled garden, but with the deep sense of peace I feel by the volcanic lake. These feelings have prompted me to revisit ecofeminism, a situated position with which I have always been profoundly uncomfortable. Why I revisit ecofeminism can be explained by my age as my body tips into decline and with it I experience the fears around degeneration and death and the need to search beyond the individual bodily self. I have recognized that ecofeminism’s strong promotion of the feminine and spiritual can be highly appealing and empowering for many women (see Nelson’s concerns about this in her chapter this volume). But in engaging in a small way in the daily activities of PdiV and in my enjoyment of the lake at all times of day as I gaze, swim and walk, I have begun to sense much more clearly that humans depend on and are sustained by the non-human world. I have also been drawn to the writings of decolonial feminism and the need to decentre humans in understanding the economy and to make more visible non-Western cultures’ understanding of the need to regenerate sources of sustenance. I have revisited Australian ecofeminist writing such as that of Ariel Salleh (1997) and Val Plumwood (1994), and become more aware of decolonial histories and the ‘otherwise’ of non-Western cosmologies, and how to make deeper links between ecology, economy and non-human and human lives.9 I have found myself interested in alternative economies based on reciprocity and redistribution among humans and non-humans. I have become vegetarian again. But worrying away inside is always this question – is this romantic delusion? Is this living FPE or am I escaping into the particular, because understanding the global and the collisions and collusions has proved just too damn difficult? The need to rethink the economy, the environment from ‘otherwise’ positions, other cosmologies that give agency to the earthworm, as Latour reminds us, and indeed to the soil, is a challenge. Fifty years ago Rachel Carson (2000) warned that the attempt by humans to

harcourt  |   255 control nature was arrogant, dangerous and will lead to disaster. The uncomfortable questions Carson asked in 1962 are even more vital today, as we cannot help but recognize that we need to understand far better how humanity is part of nature, and therefore if we exploit nature we are directly exploiting ourselves, our health, our well-being and our future. Will we be able to love them? How can feminist political ecology as an evolving practice and analysis contribute to the envisioning and practising  of different worlds? How do we bring together the human and the non-human? In seeking to understand this, I am inspired by Haraway’s concept of ‘naturecultures’. Haraway has opened up questions around the scientific ‘truth’ of nature, in her historically and culturally situated reading of technoscience. Haraway undermines the binary opposition of nature/culture by drawing it into one term (with multiple expressions) – ‘naturecultures’. She argues that ‘nature and culture are tightly knotted in bodies, ecologies, technologies and times’ (1997). By dissolving the binary opposition between the two constructs she underlines their intrinsic connection. Haraway’s proposal is that we are not innocent players when it comes to our engagement in challenging ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ and that we must assume responsibility for constructing alternative cultures within our own specific environment. These environments include our bodies and the technologies that mediate our lives. In the ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ (1991) she also unsettled the givens of embodiment in her metaphor of the cyborg that looks at the blurring of boundaries between human bodies and technologies. She quotes Barad: ‘Embodiment is a matter not of being specifically situated in the world, but rather of being in the world in its dynamic specificity. … Ethics is therefore not about right response to a radically exterior/ised other, but about responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part’ (Barad 2007: 377, 393, quoted in Haraway 2007). Our specific environment is one of continually advancing technoscience – Haraway asks us to look at the unexpected ways in which ‘human and non-human, the organic and technological, carbon and silicon, freedom and structure, history and myth, the rich and the poor, the state and the subject, diversity and depletion, modernity

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and postmodernity, and nature and culture’ come together in nature/ culture (Haraway 1997: 4). This understanding of naturecultures complicates my self-reflections on how I have tried to practise FPE (see Di Chiro and Harcourt, Knox and Tabassi, this volume). The natureculture of the blue volcanic lake is constructed as much by those polluting speedboats as the cygnets that I delight in watching glide past me in the quiet stillness of the morning hours. The loud summer visitors from the Convento and the caravan parks and their rubbish overflows into the lake define it as much as the migrating birds that winter there. I also have to understand how my everyday life is informed by technologies. The internet connects me to different places I have visited (or not) and to the people with whom I work but rarely see. It introduces me to knowledge that I would otherwise not find. In my wanderings on the internet I found out that Donna Haraway had visited and been inspired by Australian culture and people. I was struck by her interest in the artist Patricia Piccinini, a ‘sister in technoculture’, whom Haraway (2007) describes as, like her, like me: ‘the offspring of white settler colonies, their frontier practices, their ongoing immigrations, and their bad memories and troubled discourses of indigeneity, belonging, appropriation, wastelands, progress, and exclusion’. Viewing Piccinini’s work I saw new meanings of naturecultures that helped me think through my own rejection of what I experience as the ugliness of urban city life. As Piccinini comments, there are the ‘unexpected consequences of the stuff we don’t want but must somehow accommodate. There is no question as to whether there will be undesired outcomes; my interest is in whether we will be able to love them’ (Piccinini 2006, quoted in Haraway 2007). As we watch the extinctions and the violence around us we may well have to consider whether it will be necessary to grow to love the hybrids we are creating. What do we do with the nasty stuff, the mutations and crazy ways of modern life, including the difficult compromises we make on a daily basis? There are the anxieties around our health, the violations of polluted air and water, a cloud of fear that feeds into what we eat, where we go, whom we tolerate, even down to what parts of our body we can live with (as women choose to remove their breasts to avoid breast cancer).10 We are living with slippages, with degradation, with waste. Our

harcourt  |   257 future direction will necessarily be both positive and negative. It cannot all be rosy; we need to acknowledge the anxiety, ‘staying with the trouble’, working with the discomfort, not quite knowing with what we are living. We need to broaden our theory from a narrow frame of demands for our rights, to move from blaming the rich and their elite lifestyles, to confronting and living with the uncertainties, the violations and sadness we encounter in our daily lives. Our hope is that in telling the story from our standpoints we are in the very act of writing, addressing and making necessary changes in ways we do not yet fully envisage. This requires that we move from a language of uncertainty based on citation and positioning in the academe to building on the lessons we have learnt from our FPE experiences, from where the ‘we’ is situated. Notes 1  See, for example, Nura Gili Centre of Indigenous Programmes at the University of New South Wales, www. nuragili.unsw.edu.au, accessed 13 Febru­ ary 2014. 2  There were many different women’s networks attending. I went representing Women in Development Europe. There were also many stars, such as Nobel prize-winner Wangaari Mathai and ecofeminist Vandana Shiva, feminist and wife of the president of Costa Rica Margarita Arias, Bella Abzug, founder of the Women and Environment Development Organization, along with a stream of high court judges. 3  For a comprehensive debate about those discussions from Rio 1992 to Rio+20 in 2012 see ‘Greening the economy’, Development, 55(1), www. unrisd.org/80256B3C005BCCF9/search/ C3584FE61B5EAD60C12579BF004D3B40 ?Open Document, accessed 13 February 2014. 4  These discourses were traced in the journal I edited in that period, Development: Journal of the Society for International Development. A number of the titles of the journal issues depict the type of debates that were engaging the

progressive development community in the 1990s: 1997 – ‘A global crisis of im­ agination’, 40(3); 1998 – ‘Consumption, civil action and sustainable develop­ ment’, 41(1), ‘Sustainable livelihoods communities negotiating for change’, 41(2); 1999 – ‘Environmental politics’, 42(2); see www.palgrave-journals. com/development/archive/index.html, ­accessed 13 February 2014. 5  The official outcome document was ‘ The future we want’, negotiated earlier than the Rio meeting. This has now become part of the branding of the next stage of the UN process as it moves towards the Sustainable Development Goals. See, for example, www.un.org/en/ sustainablefuture/, accessed 9 February 2014. 6  For more information about the Convento see the website at www. conventobolsena.org, accessed 9 Febru­ ary 2014. 7  More than once, when I went to collect my water at five euro cents per litre, I fell into arguments with elderly agricultural workers, who, seeing me there, stopped to tell me not to waste my money. The water has always had a­ rsenic in it, they explain,

258   |  eight the ­authorities have just decided to put the safety level up to get money into their pockets. Their families have always drunk the water, and will continue to do so whatever the mayor might say. 8  By value I do not mean an economistic value but rather acknowl­ edging care and love as critical to our well-being, not peripheral or something to be taken for granted. The feminist economist Nancy Folbre (2010) brings care and sexuality into the centre of economic ideas in her description of the evolution of patriarchal capitalism and the relationship between production and reproduction. 9  See Walsh, this volume. 10  For example, there are many news items reporting the thirty-eightyear-old movie star Angelina Jolie doing the right thing by having a double mastectomy to avoid breast cancer and quoting medical experts as recommend­ ing the ‘treatment’; see www.mirror. co.uk/lifestyle/health/angelina-joliesdouble-mastectomy-given-3138115, ac­ cessed 13 February 2014. See also www. breastcentre.com on US medical clinics offering previvor surgery advertising radical mastectomy to prevent breast cancer – including a free app download.

References Agostino, A. (2015) ‘Climate justice and women’s agency: voicing other ways of doing things’, in R. Baksh and W. Harcourt, The Oxford University Press Handbook on Transnational Feminist Movements: Knowledge, Power and Social Change, Oxford and New York: OUP. Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway, Durham, NC: Duke Univer­ sity Press. Bird Rose, D. (2004) Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press.

Carson, R. (2000) Silent Spring, Har­ mondsworth: Penguin. Charkiewicz, E. (2009) ‘A feminist critique of climate change discourse. From biopolitics to necropolitics’, DFG Dossier on Alternative Climate Change Politics, Climate Change Coalition. Dankelman, I. (2012) ‘Women advocating for sustainable livelihoods and gen­ der equality on the global stage’, in W. Harcourt (ed.), Women Reclaiming Sustainable Livelihoods: Spaces Lost, Spaces Gained, London: Palgrave. Dirlik, A. (1998) ‘Globalism and the politics of place’, Development, 44(2): 7–13. Escobar, A. (2006) ‘Difference and conflict in the struggle over natural resources: a political ecology frame­ work’, Development, 49(3): 6–13. — (2008) Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Folbre, N. (2010) Greed, Lust and Gender: A History of Economic Ideas, Oxford: OUP. Haraway, D. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York and London: Routledge. — (1997) Modest_Witness@Second_ Millennium. FemaleMan Meets Onco­ Mouse, London: Routledge. — (2007) ‘Speculative fabulations for technoculture’s genera­ tions: taking care of unexpected country’, www.patriciapiccinini. net/­writing/30/20/38, accessed 7 ­February 2014. Harcourt, W. (2001) ‘Reflections: the politics of place and racism in Aus­ tralia: a personal exploration’, Merid­ ians: Feminism, race, transnationalism, 1(2): 194–207. — (2009) Body Politics in Development: Critical Debates in Gender and Devel­ opment, London: Zed Books. — (2012) ‘Epilogue’, in W. Harcourt

harcourt  |   259 (ed.), Women Reclaiming Sustain­ able Livelihoods: Spaces Lost, Spaces Gained, London: Palgrave. Harcourt, W. and A. Escobar (2005) Women and the Politics of Place, Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press. Harcourt, W., A. Brooke Wilson, A. Escobar and D. Rocheleau (2013) ‘A ­Massey muse’, in D. Featherstone (ed.), Spatial Politics: Essays for ­Doreen Massey, London: Routledge. Latour, B. (2011) ‘Waiting for Gaia. Com­ posing the common world through arts and politics’, Lecture at the French Institute, London, November, www.bruno-latour.fr, accessed 7 ­February 2014. Luke, T. W. (1999) ‘Environmentality as green governmentality’, in E. Darier (ed.), Discourses of the Environment, Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 121–51. Massey, D. (1994) Space, Place, and Gender, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. — (2002) ‘Don’t let’s counterpose place and space’, Development, 45(2): 24–5.

— (2004) ‘Geographies of responsibil­ ity’, Geografiska Annaler, 86B(1): 5–18. Osterweil, M. (2005) ‘Place-based globalism: locating women in the alternative globalization movement’, in W. Harcourt and A. Escobar (eds), Women and the Politics of Place, Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press. Piccinini, P. (2006) In Another Life, Catalogue, Wellington City Gal­ lery, Wellington, New Zealand, www.­patriciapiccinini.net/100/60, accessed 7 February 2014. Plumwood, V. (1994) Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, London: Routledge. Read, P. (2000) Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership, Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press. Rocheleau, D., B. Thomas-Slater and E. Wangari (1996) Feminist Political Ecology: Global Issues and Local Experiences, London: Routledge. Salleh, A. (1997) Ecofeminism as Politics, London/New York: Zed Books/ Palgrave.

9 | KNOWLEDGE ABOUT, KNOWLEDGE WITH: DILEMMAS OF RESEARCHING LIVES, NATURE AND GENDERS OTHERWISE

Larissa Barbosa da Costa, Rosalba Icaza and Angélica María Ocampo Talero

Introduction What happens if we see social struggles as questioning our world­ views concerning lives, nature and genders? In this chapter, we ­reflect upon this question through our intellectual and personal travels through academic research. The three of us were invited to participate in the workshop that gathered together the authors who have contributed to this book, and as such we were offered the opportunity to reflect upon what we had learnt and what we had found inspiring in thinking about lives, nature and genders. The methodology that we followed was a free exchange of ideas led by three questions: • Is there a role for academia and for social movements when thinking about alternatives to the ecologically violent presents? • In which ways do our social locations (gender, class, ethnicity) play a role in the engagements we have developed in our research? • Which kind of research practices/perspectives/tools do each of us deploy to advance our understandings of social resistance to transforming ecologically violent contexts? Our conversation took place over three different days in May and June 20131 and was conducted mainly in English, but with Spanish and Portuguese coming into play when meanings were not easy to find in English as our lingua franca. All the conversations were recorded and transcripts were produced and circulated among the three of us, from which a first draft was agreed. As we had known each other for over four years, starting a conversation was not difficult. However, while conducting this conversation in the mode of a ‘trialogue’ we realized that, despite our having been

da costa et al.  |   261 in academia as a full-time lecturer and researcher (Rosalba) and as full-time PhD research fellows (Angélica and Larissa), it had been extremely rare to find moments and spaces to have deep conversations among the three of us. Therefore, for us this conversation was a privilege and an opportunity to share reflections based on our research trajectories. ‘Ustedes somos nosotras’:2 our commitments Larissa (L): I have been committed to social justice and environmental activism in Brazil since the 1990s. As such, I have collaborated with groups and communities in different parts of the country, both in urban and rural contexts, as well as having worked with some Brazilian and international NGOs. As a practitioner and activist, my work involved contributing to and facilitating processes of social mobilization, political environmental education and participatory governance based on the principles of popular education, and experimenting with participatory methods. I am currently a PhD researcher at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, the Netherlands, and a participant in the Other Knowledges Group (OKG).3 Presently, my research interest focuses on the politics of  knowledges, more precisely on the experiences of some ‘social movement universities’ in Latin America, such as those created by the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) and La Via Campesina (LVC) in Brazil, and some indigenous and peasant movements in Ecuador and Mexico. These initiatives, which take very different shapes, have been created both to support movement struggles and to contribute to thinking and doing alternative political and life projects. Some of them are actively engaged in decolonizing knowledge and making visible other epistemologies and practices of knowing. The research seeks to understand what these spaces are, do and mean together with those making it. By claiming the authority of their knowledges and practices, these ‘universities’ are challenging hegemonic forms of knowledge and the ways we commonly do research. Therefore, I am concerned with moving away from doing research  about  movements and peoples towards doing research  with  them. I am particularly interested in methodologies seeking to decolonize research practices, relationships  and academic language. I am also interested in emotions both as expressions and ways of knowing and politicizing life.

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I joined the ISS colloquium on ‘Bodies, technologies and resources: deepening conversations on gender and the green economy’, held in November 2012, hoping to learn and to share experiences and reflections concerning people’s knowledges and struggles for bodies, nature and territories, as well as to find a fresh feminist perspective. At that time I had just come back from a period of ten months in Latin America, and the diversity of views and experiences present in the workshop helped me to make sense of some of the encounters  I  had had, as well as to reflect further on my research practices

Rosalba (R): I am a Mexican feminist, mother of two and holder of a PhD in international studies, currently a faculty member at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS), in The Hague, the Netherlands. At the core of my thinking and teaching has always been an interest in understanding and supporting struggles for social justice, and particularly indigenous and working-class women’s individual and collective resistance to interrelated forms of transnational/global oppressions. I became interested in women’s social struggles as an activist in Mexico City working for a network of social movement organizations opposing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Presently my research agenda focuses on a critical rethinking of the modern/colonial notions of region and regionalism through the political and epistemic visibility of knowledges and cosmovisions that have been actively produced as backward or subaltern by hegemonic practices of knowledge-making within the disciplines of international relations and international political economy. After a decade of professional practice in the Anglo-Saxon/North/ European academy, which emotionally and intellectually drained me owing to its emphasis on the ‘production’ of graduates, papers and grants, I took the personal/political/ethical/epistemic decision to privilege collaborative research initiatives over individual point-based work/ publications. For me, this has been a way to break down the isolation and individualistic-oriented practices that characterize contemporary ‘corporate’ academy, but also a concrete and modest way of contesting them from within. Thankfully, I have not been alone but have been very well supported and inspired by colleagues and friends from the Transnational Network Other Knowledges (RETOS)4 and its Virtual Seminar on Gender, Movements and Networks. RETOS has become

da costa et al.  |   263 the place where I can engage in research on epistemic justice as a collaborative and concrete process. As a teacher, my pedagogical practice has focused on making the classroom a space to share ideas/experiences about the academy as a colonizing practice and/or emancipatory possibility. Together with some ISS students, I have sought to identify and support forms of epistemic resistance that promote global social justice, situated in concrete geographies, cosmologies, bodies and experiences. Therefore, I am interested in the application of co-labour, activist-research and action-research methodologies in my teaching and research, and committed to facilitating spaces for mutual learning between practitioners and academics. I attended the colloquium in November 2012 looking forward to learning from feminist colleagues – teachers, researchers and practitioners – about how they engage with political ecology practices that are critical of the so-called green economy. I first felt concern about this topic when listening to indigenous women in Mexico and Guatemala and their experiences of resistance against extractive industries and ecotourist initiatives.

Angélica María (A): Before starting my PhD at ISS, my research interests and practices focused on understanding and creating with others political space to support the everyday political practices of urban young men and women in their search and struggles for social transformation. It was powerful and inspiring to conduct interdisciplinary research and collective action together with other scholars, students, young activists and some NGOs and public officials. I did so from my position as assistant professor in the Department of Psychology of the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia. Since 2010, when I started the PhD in the Netherlands, my priority has focused on understanding the dynamics of armed conflict in my country and its effects on the peasants’ political experiences. My research has shifted from an approach centred on ‘youth’ to one that is grounded in a more historical and situated ‘generational framework’. I have tried to decentre and move beyond my urban view of Colombia’s reality and explore the face of my country as seen through the experiences of young and old generations of peasants living in some rural areas of the region of Sur de Bolivar. Of particular interest has been working together to understand the embodied experiences of

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‘the state’ in these conflict-affected areas of Colombia. We did this through biographical narrations, workshops, drawings, pictures and participation in local and national meetings and events. It is my hope that this research will contribute to making more visible the key role that the subjective dimension of state formation plays not only in the peasants’ transformative political actions, but also for academia, public officials and NGO professionals interested in designing public policies with peasant communities, especially those affecting men and women of young generations. I decided to attend the November 2012 colloquium in order to enrich my ongoing analysis of the use of violence against nature as a technique for governing life and peasants’ territories within specific forms of statehood. However, the effects of the debate went far beyond this and provoked reflections about the questions guiding this dialogue. The power of words The first day we got together, our point of departure was not the colloquium. We started by talking about a conversation on Facebook that two of us had followed about a young Sikh woman: Ohio State University student Balpreet Kaur.5 A man took a photo of Ms Kaur without her knowing while she was waiting at an airport. This man was particularly surprised by the physical appearance of Ms Kaur, who has facial hair, and posted the photo on the Reddit social site with the following comment ‘I’m not sure what to conclude from this’. His post provoked a whole range of comments, and something unexpected. Ms Kaur herself wrote back to the man with these words: ‘Yes, I’m a baptized Sikh woman with facial hair. Yes, I realize that my gender is often confused and I look different than most women. However, baptized Sikhs believe in the sacredness of this body – it is a gift that has been given to us by the Divine Being (which is genderless actually) – and must keep it intact as a submission to the divine will.’ She explained that she was not upset or offended and continued, ‘if anyone wanted a photo, they could have just asked and I could have smiled. To me my face isn’t important but the smile and the happiness that lie behind the face are.’ For us, this interesting exchange of words displayed the power of kindness and confident language vis-à-vis the aggressive, racist or sarcastic tone that characterized many of the comments on the social

da costa et al.  |   265 site, and which, as discussed, also occur in academic environments. With these ideas in our head, we started our conversation. Research practices to transform ecologically violent contexts R: How shall we work? Shall I read the questions? A: Maybe we can start by simply sharing our stories according to the three questions. We have different backgrounds and trajectories that together can help us create bridges that could lead to more innovative forms of understanding. L: I think that it will be useful if we refer to our own research experiences as they may reveal the ways we do research but also the tensions or uncomfortable issues. R: It is interesting what you both said. You are actually pointing at experienced-based answers, you are not simply starting with a phrase such as ‘from the perspective of this author, I am thinking that academia should …’ You both are actually starting from the idea that if we are going to answer questions we need to go back to our own stories, intellectual and personal backgrounds, and experiences. This is already a position and an example of the kind of perspectives that we are using to deploy or advance our understanding of social reality. I think this is very important and it is not a given. But then, how can we link our experiences to the way in which we have been interacting with academia? We are part of academia but we have a particular understanding of what academia is, what it is supposed to do or not. How do you relate your research to the way in which you see academia? A: Indeed, I think these questions cannot be answered just by theoretical ideas. I can start sharing with you both some reflections from my own experience after my last fieldwork period in Colombia. L: Why are you using the term fieldwork? A: There is a particular experience behind the option of maintaining the use of this word. R: This is very interesting. Larissa, you sound quite uncomfortable with the term ‘fieldwork’ while Angélica is not. From my point of view, we have here a point of tension. I too used to feel quite uncomfortable with the term, but if you think about the meaning of fieldwork, that is related to agricultural work (sowing and harvesting), it can be seen as very active, grounded and related to the ‘territorio/ territory’. However, I am also aware that it has been understood as a

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detached/objective moment in which academia becomes the place of knowledge generation, and hence it is thought that the researcher is not going to harvest anything in the field except data which later on he/she has to filter through his/her own thinking/theory. So, fieldwork is just about gathering the fruits and eating them, then coming back and analysing the taste. However, the origin of the word ‘fieldwork/ trabajo de campo’, as grounded in a particular place, can entail a different connotation … A: In that sense it is interesting to see how we (re-)create meanings according to our embodied experiences. I can understand your hesitation, Larissa. I also used to have the same kind of feeling during my previous research practices in urban areas. At that time, part of myself always felt uncomfortable and even rejected this idea of fieldwork. In 2011 I started working with peasants, women and men who are identified as leaders of the Comité Cívico (Civic Committee) del Sur de Bolívar, and my understanding of fieldwork has been totally transformed through my relationships with them. I cannot deny the system of power operating in the modern and colonial creation of this term and in the use that academia makes of it through its practices of knowledge production. However, this time I want to assert my right to create my experience of fieldwork/trabajo de campo in a different way, developing with others research practice I consider ethically and politically possible and desirable within the context of the PhD programme at ISS. Today, fieldwork means for me: the forming of deep connections with others, with the peasants’ lives and experiences; with nature through the ‘languages’ of Colombian rivers, mountains, valleys and weather; with my own self, who have been able to recognize that I am also the granddaughter of peasants. Even one of my family names – Ocampo – reminds me of my historical peasant condition in this present (translated to English, the meaning of my last name is related to ‘agricultural field’. R: I think, Angélica, that you are starting to bring more elements into the answer to the question what is the role of academia that works with social movements to address our ecological violent presents … you bring forward nature and your peasant background as researcher … On bodies, violence and technologies

Images: backhoes, torture and audio recorders A: Reflecting more about our leading questions, let me share with

da costa et al.  |   267 you some insights I developed during and after the colloquium from which the idea of this chapter was derived. As you maybe remember, I brought an image that came to my mind from the fieldwork experience: the image of a woman who was tortured until she died. It was a harsh illustration of the technologies of violence against women and communities by paramilitary forces during one period of high-intensity armed conflict in the Sur de Bolivar, Colombia (1998–2006). R: Yes, it is so terrible. When I went to the Meta region in Colombia, this link between ecologically violent practices and techniques and violence against women was everywhere: land grabbing by former paramilitary forces who are also involved in human trafficking of girls … it was all together … a totality of violences … A: When I reflect on these ecologically violent past-presents, other images come along. One of those is the image of a retroexcavadora, a backhoe that starts moving before the sunlight appears. Its sound in my ears came to mean for me the existence of illegal mining activity in my country, the extractive practices taking from our land its life. It happens in many places in Latin America and other parts of the world, as if natures and human beings were disconnected from each other and the soil was not the source of our own life as humans on this earth. R: I saw the backhoe everywhere in the Meta region in Colombia too. All these big machines taking all these minerals, destroying the soil … A: But I also think of a third image: the audio recorder. I realized that researchers could make use of it within the context of extractive practices of collecting ‘data’ or as a tool in understanding the peasants’ knowledges. During the fieldwork in the Colombian region of Sur de Bolivar, I came to question my own research practices as well as those in which I have come to see extractive aspects characterizing the relationships among some researchers/professionals and communities: there is often little or no time for interaction beyond obtaining the information that is required, and there is even less attention paid to the conditions of the dialogue than to the content itself, beyond diffused agreements regarding the use of the ‘data’. I had never reflected on that extractive dimension until I became aware of the differentiated use of the audio recorder by the researchers/professionals working in the region (including myself). The consequent implications of these different approaches are visible in the type of relationships developed with the peasants and in the research process itself.

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L: About the recorder – I also experienced an awkward situation when I visited one of the Intercultural University Amawtay Wasi (AW) centres in Macas, Ecuador.6 I came just when the Ecuadorean Council for Evaluation and Quality Assurance in Higher Education (Consejo de Evaluación, Acreditación y Aseguramiento de la Calidad de la Educación Superior – CEAACES) was conducting an evaluation.7 The Council had hired a team of researchers, including some indigenous researchers who speak two indigenous languages, to conduct the assessment. At a certain moment, when I was having an informal conversation with the team, I realized one of them was recording me. He never asked for permission and I felt this was very disrespectful and unethical. If he felt he could do that with me, of course they were doing the same with others and the community. The recorder was being used to extract things from people and, worse, without many of them realizing the possible consequences. Months later, Amawtay Wasi made public another episode in which the CEAACES team recorded conversations without consent during a visit to the headquarters of the university. During my research I have recorded conversations but I was always very careful and open, I explained beforehand who I am, what I am doing, the purpose of my research, I asked permission to record our conversation. I also told them if they felt uncomfortable at any moment I would turn the recorder off. I really tried to be very transparent and ethical. Still, many times I felt I shouldn’t use it. A: Further reflecting on the workshop and on our trialogue these days, I now connect these three types of technologies – the backhoe, torture and audio recorder – with hegemonic social practices embedded in the extractive paradigm permeating our contemporary societies. These images reveal a dislocated feminine principle8 of human inter­ actions in which others – particularly young/old women’s bodies – and nature become objects of consumerism and extermination.

Alternatives R: So, are there no alternatives? Are we as academics always back­ hoes? A: No, I do think there are many alternatives. I chose one possible path when I decided to do my PhD at ISS, an institution that allows its PhD researchers to spend up to one year doing fieldwork. I had to defend this idea to my home university – Pontificia Universidad

da costa et al.  |   269 Javeriana in Bogotá – one of my PhD’s sponsors. During the first four months of my fieldwork experience I did not use either an audio recorder or a camera. Instead I accompanied the professionals of the Corporación Desarrollo y Paz del Magdalena Medio–CDPMM9 (Magdalena Medio Development and Peace Corporation) and the peasants from the Comité Cívico del Sur de Bolivar – CCSB – in their activities. I just felt that I could not simply go and start interviewing them. Only after four months of interacting with them did I feel there was sufficient trust and confidence to ask them and record our conversations. I decided just to ‘be there’ with the professionals and peasant leaders, women and men who belong to CCSB, while they designed and implemented their Collective Reparation Plan as victims of armed conflict in the region. My action research approach was based in my role as acompañante/companion of the process. It means seeing, perceiving, listening, understanding, learning, asking questions, reflecting together, opening the heart, experiencing fear, anger, joy, love and compassion; experiencing illness and healing in our mutual relationships at different levels. In my position as researcher, being with them has meant not telling others what to do; rather it has been a process of opening spaces to reflect on shared experiences. After a year of being with them, I presented and discussed my preliminary understandings and we discussed areas of agreements, disagreements, emergent questions, suggestions, possible futures and dreams and appreciation of the common experience. During this time I chose to explore my own way of working with the recorder. It was there all the time. Peasants and professionals reminded me when it was not on. For them, it also became a tool for collective memory reconstruction. Many of them still keep the transcript of our conversations, and beyond its use for the purposes of the PhD, we are still deciding about use of this collective creation.10 After completing this phase of the fieldwork, I went back to The Hague with clear insights: this is the role of academia I want to contribute to re-creating. This is the space I feel comfortable in, a space where it is possible to create conocimiento/knowledge embedded in the life shared with others; a space for creating a path of con­ocimiento (Anzaldúa 2002) that, sceptical of rational thinking, ‘questions the conventional knowledge’s current categories, classifications and contents’ (ibid.: 541).

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From fieldwork to encounters: on the rationality of academia as a site of power and resistance L: Many of the things Angélica said resonate with my own research experiences, particularly the use of the recorder as a technology of extraction. But let me start by talking about the fieldwork issue. My problem is not with the term itself, but with the rationality embedded in the academic language. We tend to use fieldwork as a neutral term, but the term was coined in this very extractive rationality and it usually comes together with many other words and practices – for example, we go out and conduct fieldwork to collect data and to contact informants and then we come back to our offices and libraries to produce knowledge. The field is treated as this sort of ‘wild’ place. So, for me, fieldwork is a term that asserts this sharp separation between the academic space, as the space of knowledge generation, and the field as a place to extract raw materials. But it happens that the ‘raw materials’ are in fact people’s life experiences and knowledges. Therefore, my critique and attempts to resignify the term have led me to propose reflecting about fieldwork as encounters. Fieldwork is not about ‘we’ researchers going to the field, it is about the ‘encounters’ we have with people and how we engage with them and their knowledges, and it is not only about research but also about life. We meet people, we share ideas, emotions, knowledges. These can be positive and exciting moments, but there is also a lot of tension. Tensions that emerge when we meet people that are very different from us. For instance, I am not a peasant, or indigenous. I am an urban, middle-class woman. Some see me as ‘white’ while others do not. Some see me as a researcher, others as woman or an activist, others as Brazilian, or a mix of these many identities. I like the word encounters because it puts forward all of this: excitement and enthusiasm, curiosity, but also fear, discomfort, perplexity. In many moments in my research I was able to engage in conversations about these differences and commonalities. For instance, although I am not indigenous, I feel a strong spiritual connection with nature, and this has opened doors for communication with people. On the other side, I was always reminded that, as an academic, indigenous people would be a bit suspicious of me. I think this is one way of engaging with people on a different level. This is related to the second reason why I like to think about encounters: it gives

da costa et al.  |   271 the idea that this process involves two or more sides! It should not be about us going out there to extract things. If we want to change things, if as academics we want to reflect on how we engage with people, encounters makes more sense and is less extractive. R: According to what you said, Larissa, from your point of view an alternative to extractive academia concerns how we relate to people? L: Yes, in part it is about how we relate to people, but not only that, because the way we write about and represent them also matters. Anyway, this is why I am also concerned with decolonial practices in research and how we engage with people’s knowledges in such a way that we share and learn from each other and don’t just take things. Of course, we cannot make power disappear from these relationships, but I think it makes a difference if we see people as informants or if we acknowledge they are knowledgeable people and therefore our interlocutors. So, I think it is important to reflect on the academic language, the assumptions behind it, in order to move from fieldwork to encounters and from doing research about to doing it with people. This reflection was inspired by my encounter with people from the MST (Rural Landless Workers’ Movement) in Brazil. They have this practice they call ‘Critique and self-critique’. This is a space, a moment when they reflect about how they are doing things. But reflection is not only about processes but also about how each person plays her role in it. I have the sense that in academia we are always criticizing something but much less ourselves and our roles. R: But Larissa, in the workshop there was a participant who said ‘we are more than flesh and bones, we need to go beyond that’. Do you remember that? Another person said that in her work with communities with women she appreciates deeply, they made her think about herself and her practices as a researcher. Indeed, some participants were talking about what you are saying! L: Of course, some feminists have done and are doing fantastic work on this. But what I am also trying to say is that I feel I have learnt much more from people in these encounters than I can possibly return to them. I think this is important in the sense that we need to acknowledge these other knowledges and try to break up these hierarchies of knowledges. R: Larissa, this is very interesting, now you are bringing in elem­ ents that start to cover our other questions. For example, the second

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­uestion is related to our social locations and the third one is q about our practices. Larissa, you have already mentioned a little bit about your research practices: you talk with the communities on what you do, on who you are. My own experience is quite similar. I introduced myself to the people with whom I work mentioning that I am a teacher trying to find ways to learn how to transmit concrete/embodied/situated experience of resistance to students who want to translate them into their own contexts. For me this is an act of humbling academia … L: Exactly, we need to be more humble, because academia leads us to talk about the ‘others’ all the time and to reflect little on what we learn from them. This is another point I want to make. We tend to judge or explain the others but we are not putting ourselves enough in a position where we learn from them. This is especially important for the issue of bodies, techno­logies, nature and violence. From my experiences, people in the social movements I am working with are the ones who, with their bodies, by growing their food, by taking care of their children, creating their knowledge centres, rebuilding everyday relationships, are doing worlds otherwise. What I tried to do during my encounters was to engage with them with my body, heart, soul and brain. I embodied many things by working and sharing everyday activities with them. In these universities, you go there to think, to do, to work and to be together. The lessons that we have to learn are coming from these experiences of togetherness, because in this way movements are showing us how to live in another way. All of this is well beyond participatory observation. I would call it a life experience. I remember you mentioned that in your recent travel to Colombia, you suddenly felt this connection with nature. In my case, what I experienced was this sense of commonality, togetherness, the power of doing things together. It is so clear in my mind and heart that the day I left the assenta­ mento in Paraná and had go back to São Paulo, the flashy lights, the traffic, the noise, the hurry, people who do not look at each other, everything had become so strange to me. Then I understood how commonality, care and nature had deeply taken me. I very much miss addressing and being addressed by people as ‘companheira’. Companionship was one of the very meaningful experiences I had,

da costa et al.  |   273 and I came to realize that if you cannot feel it, and learn it, it is very difficult to understand what these ‘social movement universities’ are about. Another thing I tried, and I am happy I did, was to work with drawings. At the beginning this was more like a complementary method but later I realized how important the drawings were. When I look at the images and hear people’s explanations, I can see this really opened up space for people to express themselves in different ways, to express things they haven’t put into words or writing. In the drawings, I perceive there is a strong sense of life, and how it is experienced in the everyday. This is very important when we talk about bodies, technologies and violence, because it shows this culture of life that peoples and movements are building up to counter the culture of death, which is related to extraction, displacement, violence, economic exploitation, war and politics. In all of the drawings there is the issue of relationships with people and nature and it is really key to why people are doing things. Let me show you this one. This is the drawing of a person who represented what he saw when he just arrived at the Latin American School of Agroecology (ELAA)11 in Brazil. He saw simple, poor buildings, nothing like the ‘university’ he was expecting, he just saw deprivation. But after some time, he understood the school in this other way, which is about life, politics, the planet, relationships and reciprocity. (See Figure 9.1, page 274.) L: These other ones represent the social movement universities as part of people’s struggles for life, spaces of solidarity, hope and freedom. (See Figure 9.2, page 275.) R: It is beautiful! It displays the non-fixed nature of our interpretations. It is so difficult and sad that sometimes academia forces us to do that: ‘According to this author, this social movement is counterhegemonic or not …’ When you have a totalizing ‘framework’, reality becomes ‘that’. Of course, we normally add more elements or we bring new data to make our frameworks stronger. But this drawing shows us how having a fixed gaze is so artificial. L: People I met in the universities are very reflexive, they are thinking about what they are doing all the time. They are very humble and aware that they have limitations and contradictions. So, they have this understanding that they are constantly making, and they have developed a dialogical and reflexive culture. They are building things

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9.1  Repres­entations of social movement ­University A, inter­ locutor A/Brazil (drawings provided by Larissa Barbosa da Costa 2013)

step by step, experimenting and trying. They are more interested in questions than answers because this keeps them on the move. At the same time, they do not feel ashamed of their mistakes. They do not feel the need to have everything clear in their minds and then do it. They do it every day. R: We sometimes pretend to have answers … L: So, there is so much to learn from them. One of the ways the academic world can engage with such life worlds movements is by trying to learn from them, how to criticize ourselves. Therefore, right

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9.2  Representations of social movement Universities B and C, interlocutor B/Brazil, interlocutor C/Mexico (drawings provided by Larissa Barbosa da Costa 2013)

now, I feel that it is important to reflect on how a great part of the scientific work ignores or denies these other knowledges. Most of the time we are working against them, but we need to ask why we keep doing that.

On power as a creative force R: Let me ask you something different. It seems that we – Larissa, Angélica and Rosalba – have a tendency to agree with this approach of engaged research or committed research when working with ­people who have been marginalized and produced as non-existent by academia. But what happens if you are doing research, say, with bankers in the financial district? Shall we just bring our recorders and ask them what do you do? What do you think about ‘this or that’? Is this self-critical/engaged position just necessary when we as academics want to challenge the status quo and privilege? Or

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is every person we ‘interview’ for our ‘data collection’ part of the same kind of approach? I am asking this because I have been asked this question before in relation to my work with indigenous people and I have been confronted with the question: do you treat other people differently? I would like to reflect upon it because in the last seminar I attended in CIDECI12 in Chiapas there was a related question posed by one of the indigenous representatives of the community of Cheran in Michoacán, Mexico. This community has taken up arms because the police and the military are not protecting them from drug traffickers or are actually colluding with them. This person was listening to Mahij Radnema, a post-development intellectual of Iranian background who was once a minister in the Iranian government and then went into exile and has lived for a while in France. This man was sharing with all the people present his personal trajectory as part of state power, his closeness to power. Interestingly, this man from Cheran asked him: ‘could you who have been part of power explain to me something … what are the weaknesses of power? You must know because you have been up there.’ When I heard this I thought, ‘Oh – how amazing – that is a research question for me for the rest of my life!’ But I also think the question and my realization are connected to what Angélica and Larissa have been saying on the role of academia. For the last couple of years, I have been thinking that my task as a teacher in postgraduate education is to criticize academic practices that dehumanize our experiences of knowing or that through sarcasm try to push students to ‘learn’. However, when this person from Cheran asked this question, what are the weaknesses of power, it made me reflect on my own intellectual and personal travel. At some point, I made the conscious decision to work otherwise after engaging with indigenous women who rejected being called feminists but were fighting for their rights as women in their communities and with their compañeros. This made me realize the importance of methodo­ logies and ways of working that could act as cracks and fissures in a supposedly hegemonic/unitary system of oppression and that reveal the inconsistencies in which academia operates. However, this also made me realize that academia is also a site of struggle! Therefore, for me it is fascinating to hear this question, because power also operates within academia.

da costa et al.  |   277 It also makes me think that if I am going to do research with those in power, how am I going to do it? For the last four years, I have made the conscious decision not to talk to anybody who works for/ represents state and corporate power. Is this a mistake? I think so now. But then, if I am engaging with them, how I am going to relate with them, to those who actually embody power, with their presence, with their attitude, with their whole being. I have forgotten how to do it now! It is clear to me that I have to be self-reflective on the way I try to do research when speaking to power. I think I know my ethical position here, but imagine that I want to do research on the last Mexican governmental campaign to combat hunger. The current administration has invited Coca-Cola, Pepsico and Monsanto to collaborate. Can you imagine all the technologies of power and the reconfiguration of subjectivities in relation to food and taste that they have been putting in place? Activists in Mexico are constantly saying that indigenous and peasant communities need to be aware of what is coming: very well-intentioned people from the Ministry of Social Development visiting their communities to offer Monsanto’s seeds, which are cheaper. Currently, Pepsico and Nestlé are sending invitations for workshops on ‘how to feed your children’. Can you imagine that? For me, the question has political and ethical implications. L: I do not have an answer to that. I never reflected on this, but I think that while dealing with power we cannot be naive. When I interact with people in powerful positions, I feel I have to express my power too. I try to play with power … R: … as a creative force? L: Yes. I have had interactions with people in powerful positions in the government and I really tried to listen and understand their rationality too. R: So, the answer would be that in order to understand their weaknesses one has to understand their rationalities? L: Yes, I think so, but not only that. For instance, in all the places I visited, activists from the movements were quite critical of academics. They said they know academics like to do their own things, and that they had concerns about how research about them affects their struggles. They reminded me of my responsibilities and asked me to be conscious about the implications of my work. I think movements are more and more putting us in the corner and asking us to be

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more ethical. They are demanding different forms of engagement, and this is a new kind of power relation. R: For me what you say is already a kind of an answer on what is the role of academia. Identifying the cracks and the weaknesses, but the issue here is that academia is also part of power. That is the other part of the answer and we cannot deny the privileges that academia holds. A: In my view, the question of what are the weaknesses of power challenges me to clarify some misleading assumptions behind it. For example, the idea that ‘someone has the power’ does not fit well with me. Inspired by my own understanding of Foucault, I prefer to view power as a principle within relationships, not as something that someone has. Power is the tension of forces between subjects according to certain positions (class, gender, generation, race, ethnicity, religion …). Within this context, it is one thing to understand the source of authority that one person might exercise against another. Another is to understand the tensions and effects on the relationships between these subjects. And yes, I agree with Larissa that possible understandings on these different levels demand listening to the actors involved, comprehension of everyone’s practices, including those of the high-level government representatives. That is to say, one needs to examine also the context of production of these practices. R: Let me push you a little bit, Angélica. The question on the weaknesses of power came from a person who is experiencing force that kills. What shall we do? Shall we expose their credibility? There are many strategies to counter force but I feel the question goes deeper than strategies. A: For me it is not possible to go into the question in a general formulation. As researchers we need to understand the context and situating the so-called ‘weaknesses’ provoking the question. We need to ask why someone feels powerless and together explore alternatives. This demands creative new questions and forms of research through which people will identify the practices they want to transform and the positions they want to assume. L: I think you are right. Once one starts to situate the processes then power becomes visible. R: What you are saying is so crucial. The person was talking about a community that has shown us that they have power too. However, the person also shared his despair: ‘we now know who comes into

da costa et al.  |   279 the community and we know that our children are safe, but we also know that we cannot hold this for ever and that is why we are asking this person to tell us where the weaknesses are’. This community has realized they have the power to say no, ‘ya basta’, no more violence. However, they also realize that this exercise is not for ever, it has a limit. It seems that they need to understand the limits of those who are forcing them to be in the situation in which they find themselves. Social locations and research R: The first part of our conversation has been very much focused on telling each other which kind of experiences are informing our positions in academia. You did it by talking about what fieldwork is and how you interpret it differently. Then Angélica shared how in the workshop you made the connection between a woman who is tortured and the technologies that are used for that. Then Angélica linked those technologies to the recorder as a device that extracts knowledge. Then we jumped into the concept of power and those in power and about our role in academia and if our role is to detect how power has been exercised. For me it is interesting that most of the time we have been focusing on the role of academia, it seems that we have been very clear about what we do not like about academic extractive rationality/logic, detached objectivism, the place of objectivity and for knowledge production, etc. Implicitly, in what you have been talking about and describing, an alternative is a self-reflective position, grounded, committed work with the people with whom you spent time, by just being, hearing, listening and sharing. In both of your experiences, you have emphasized very much the time/space for reflecting on the process of engagement with the movement or the community. This is the moment when you started to think about the role of academia. You know what you don’t like about academia, and you started to practise a kind of academia that reflects about processes with the movement. However, we have not talked at all about the ways in which our social locations (gender, class, ethnicity) play a role in the kind of engagement we have developed in our research. This is interesting because you have clearly indicated that you are not feminists but

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that you felt connected with some of the ideas of the women who participated in the workshop. The second question on our social locations is central to the feminists and the kind of feminism I identified myself. But might it be just because we are feminists? A: In a certain sense we have referred to this issue, but it is relevant that you ask this question as we need to go farther. It is important to situate our experiences and knowledges as coming from different locations. L: In my case, it has been very important to realize how identities and positions are not fixed, how they depend on where we are and with whom we interact. When I am here at the ISS, I am not the same as when I am there. R: You feel that you are someone here and someone there? L: I think we experiment with different positions. One example is the question of race or colour. Here we are seen as ‘Latinas’ and we are not considered ‘white’, there we are seen as white or mestizas. It is not fixed, and the way we see ourselves also changes. The experience of being a ‘Latin American’ student and then a PhD researcher in a European university has changed me a lot. It made me much more aware of the forces of coloniality, something I used to pay much less attention to. I do not really feel comfortable in Europe or in the academic space in general; for me these spaces tend to reproduce coloniality and tend to frame people in ways in which they don’t want to be framed. I find this obsession with classifying people and ourselves very oppressive. Being a migrant and having experienced racism and discrimination have taught me so much about power and identity. Of course, when I interact with indigenous people, the ones who identify themselves as such, I am aware I am different, I am not a peasant either, so we understand that we have different lives, but the way we understand each other varies. Tensions also emerge depending who is seen to be ‘in’ or ‘out’. For instance, movements develop their own ways of doing things, and although I have been engaged with them, I am an outsider and this makes a big difference. When people from the Brazilian National School Florestan Fernandes (ENFF)13 posed me so many questions about what I wanted to do, and why and how, they wanted to decide on how to engage with me. They were clearly challenging me as an academic. In many

da costa et al.  |   281 moments when I was visiting the Amawtay Wasi centres, the rector expressed his critical opinion about researchers. He talked about researchers mostly as ‘colonizers’ who always misrepresent them. At the same time, I should mention that I have experienced different positions. When I was talking to another woman or a mother or a spiritual person, for instance, I was acknowledged as having many things in common with them despite our social differences, and because of that we have shared things we wouldn’t share with others. A: Your reflections lead me to emphasize the connection between identity and place. In our last meeting in the Other Knowledges Group (OKG), when Xochitl Leyva14 presented, I was left thinking about the following question: how do certain locations shape our identities? From there, I reflected on the challenge that this question raises: how can we avoid the imposition of public identities15 that put us ‘in boxes’ and limit our actions? I have experienced this here in Europe when, despite my trajectory as lecturer and researcher in my home country, I am mainly seen as ‘a student’. Additionally, one is viewed as a woman from the ‘Third World’. These are three positions in which you are located in a very disadvantaged net of power relationships. I do not identify myself as a feminist, but feminist epistemologies and theories have helped me understand these intersectional inequalities. They have been more visible for me now during the process of pursuing a PhD in Europe. Like Larissa, sometimes I have felt I am not part of this European institution. However, there is another face of it to which I have the sense of belonging: our PhD community, friends, professors and lecturers who value our knowledges and experiences and want to interact with us. In the midst of this tension between being excluded from/ included in, the alternative has been to identify the forces operating in the system and challenge those colonial relations in the everyday spaces of academia. This is true not only in the classroom, seminars and academic events but also in the political ones generated by the institutional bodies of participation. Performing from the position of ‘student’ in a European university has been an opportunity to see myself from another location, to recognize my cultural roots as a ‘mestiza’ and to develop with others my strengths, our collective force as PhD researchers and even my own sources for keeping the sun inside my heart even in the grey Dutch weather. But then again, I do not want to accept this position as forming my core identity.

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I am much more than that. I am a woman who, while situated within the tensions of accepting the rules of certain ‘places’, is also actively trying to reshape them and myself. L: Let me say something about positionality. Of course positionality is important because we all speak from a certain place and experience, but then we need to think that our social positions have been so essentialized. You are this, you are that, and then it becomes immutable. I think this leaves aside how people perceive and relate to us. I came to realize that our social position is not fixed. Nobody’s position is fixed. Colour, gender, class, age, religion are also not fixed. I cannot think of myself as having a fixed position any more. In this sense I believe I have realized that there is a ‘we’ dynamic to be constantly understood. R: I believe that what both of you are saying is very important: social location matters if it is not fixed and if it’s understood as always changing and in relation to others. Do you remember the comment I made when Xochitl Leyva made a presentation in the Other Knowledges Group? I mentioned that she has been doing something fantastic, very inspiring. She came not only to say ‘I am mestizo, a woman, coming from a lower class’, etc. She didn’t say anything about herself as an individual. She has done that in a couple of publications. What she did was to present the relationships that she is part of and the ‘products’ of those relationships: videos, arts, activism, etc. For me this was a concrete example of working otherwise. This is to be an academic otherwise. For me it was so inspiring. I cannot name it or conceptualize it. It is simply inspiring. From my point of view positionality is very relevant for feminism when it transcends the identity politics of showing my complex individual me, and instead helps us to display how an individual ‘I’ doesn’t exist if it is not in relation to others: human and non-human beings and dimensions. I just learned that. A: For me, Sylvia Marcos’s concept of fluid duality16 presented in one of the conferences of the Sexuality Research Initiative of the ISS in 2013 was very inspiring. For now, her concept is an answer to a situation that is always a struggle within me. I think we need to be moving and flowing between the ‘I’ and the ‘We’. I am trying to find the way to create a fruitful dialogue among what ‘I say’, what ‘others have said’ and what ‘we say’. There are moments in which expressing the ‘I’ is a privilege; it is a responsibility one wants to assume as a

da costa et al.  |   283 contribution to reflections that others have already started. In other moments, the visibility of the ‘We’ is one of the most important political commitments in academia when creating knowledge with others. At the same time, the recognition of what ‘others have said’ is an always necessary, rigorous ethical principle in the journey. R: Both of you are flagging up two very important issues here. First of all that the ‘I’ in academia is a recent shift/gain. That it is a radical move within academia. However, it is also a privilege and a responsibility. It is really interesting, because it plays a double role, a critique and a privilege. Moreover, to position ourselves without the tensions of ‘the encounters’ with others might also result in naive essentialism, by which I mean that that is not politically and ethically motivated.

More words on the us/them ‘divide’ We have tried to explore and question the power relation dynamics between us and those with whom we research, but in so doing, are we not still maintaining an artificial boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’? We think the answer is yes. How should we overcome this trap and move to a more ecological understanding of these dynamics in such a way that we contemplate and learn from differences but which breaks with hierarchies of power and knowledges? For us a first step in that direction has been to listen to each other, to make time to carefully listen. Once this was made possible, we came to realize that there is (are) no answer(s) but that for the three of us this still remains a question and a challenge we put to ourselves and our research practices, and which we consider relevant for a future FPE research agenda. Knowing that our trialogue will continue beyond this invitation and opportunity to contribute to this interesting book, we hope our deeply felt conversation may resonate with researchers, particularly those interested in feminist political ecology, and contribute by posing some interesting questions for reflection and debate. Notes 1  22 May, 27 May, 24 June 2013. 2  ‘You are us’. This is a well-known phrase from the Zapatistas that denotes their relational ways of being in/under­ standing the world and for us it conveys

what inspires our diverse political/ personal commitments. 3  The Other Knowledges Group (OKG) was started in 2009 by several MA students, researchers, lecturers and

284   |  nine activists at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, the Netherlands. It aims to be a space to ex­ plore alternative knowledges, paradigms and worldviews. The group is particu­ larly interested in how movements and people around the world are reclaiming other ways of seeing and learning about the world and building worlds otherwise. OKG ‘occupies’ a room at the ISS but is completely independent, and it was very much inspired by similar groups formed in many parts of Latin America. Sometimes special guests coming to The Hague from different parts of the world are invited to share and discuss with the group particular experiences, papers, research or books. 4  For more information on RETOS, see www.encuentroredtoschiapas. jkopkutik.org/index.php/es/. 5  See more about this story on CBC News Commentary at storify.com/ cbccommunity/bearded-sikh-womanteaches-reddit-a-lesson-in-tole, accessed 22 May 2014. 6  The Intercultural University Amawtay Wasi is a higher education initiative started by the indigenous movements/CONAIE (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador) in 2004/05 in Ecuador. Amawtay Wasi means ‘House of Wisdom’ in Quechua. They used to have a website in three languages – Quechua, Spanish and English – which has been temporarily deactivated. For the ­moment, they invite everybody interested in their activities to follow their Facebook page: www. facebook.com/universidadintercultural. amawtaywasi?fref=nf, accessed 22 May 2014. 7  At the end of 2013, after a long evaluation process, CEAACES decided to shut down the university on the grounds that it does not meet required quality standards. Since then AW has been under intervention. From the beginning

AW has contested the process and the inadequacy of the criteria used in the evaluation. They also claim indigenous peoples’ rights to have an autonomous education and denounce what they see as the colonial and political nature of the assessment. The contention is still ongoing. For more information, see the Amawtay Wasi Facebook page and the CEAACES website – www.ceaaces.gob. ec, accessed 22 May 2014. 8  I understand ‘the feminine’ as a changing, moving and multidimensional principle flowing together with the masculine one in every being and relationship. For me feminine-masculine embodied expressions are culturally and territorially situated as well as affected by historical networks of power. 9  For more information about CDPMM in Colombia, see www.pdpmm. org.co/quienes-somos/la-corporacioncdpmm, accessed 22 May 2014. 10  We – the CCSB’s peasants, the CDPMM’s professionals, some scholars from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and from the Center for Latin American Studies of Georgetown University and I – created a project, ‘Memorias para la Paz’ – Memories for Peace – aimed at continuing with the process of memory reconstruction in the region. As Colom­ bians, we want to contribute – from our plural positionality – to achieve a durable peace in a possible post-conflict scenario in the territory. We understand that one important dimension of this process is to acknowledge the local memories not only of conflict and violence against humans and nature but also of differentiated ways of living, coexisting with nature, resisting and transforming the war con­ditions. Making them visible for our­ selves, for old and young generations and for other Colombians is one step towards creating a life where communities may live with dignity. 11  For more information, see

da costa et al.  |   285 escolalatinoamericanadeagroecologia. blogspot.com, accessed 22 May 2014 (in Portuguese). 12  CIDECI-UNITIERRA is the Centro Indígena de Capacitación Integral – Universidad de la Tierra (Indigenous Centre for Holistic Capacity-building – Land University). For more informa­ tion, see egeneracionradio.org/index. php/­autonomia/autonomia/item/3768entrevista-sobre-el-cideci-universidadde-la-tierra, accessed 22 May 2014. 13  National School Florestan Fernandes is an initiative of the Land­ less Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil. For more information, see www.mst.org.br/, www.amigosenff. org.br and www.facebook.com/ pages/ENFF-Escola-Nacional-FlorestanFernandes/407714382684863 (mostly in Portuguese), accessed 22 May 2014. 14  More information on the work and publications of Mexican anthropolo­ gist Xochitl Leyva can be found here: www.encuentroredtoschiapas.jkopkutik. org/index.php/es/participantes/ espanol/nodo-chiapas/xochitl-leyvasolano-chiapas.

15  Term coined by Linda Alcoff in her book Visible Identities to refer to the ‘socially perceived self within the systems of perception and classification and the networks of community’ (Alcoff 2006: 92–3). 16  Understood as a continuous flux in which complementary/opposing poles coexist and flow towards each other. Sylvia Marcos develops this concept from her research on Mesoamerican spirituality and sexuality through a feminist critical ethno-historical reading of pre-Hispanic codices. For an example of her work, see her blog, sylviamarcos. wordpress.com, accessed 22 May 2014, and Waller and Marcos (2005).

References Alcoff, L. (2006) Visible Identities, Oxford: OUP. Anzaldúa, G. (2002) This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transforma­ tion, London: Routledge. Waller, M. and S. Marcos (eds) (2005) Dialogue and Difference: Feminisms Challenge Globalization, London: Palgrave.

10 | WORLD-WISE OTHERWISE STORIES FOR OUR ENDTIMES: CONVERATIONS ON QUEER ECOLOGIES

Wendy Harcourt, Sacha Knox and Tara Tabassi

Introductions This conversation is based on written and photographic exchanges online via Google docs and Skype calls over several months after we first met at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague in June 2013. Our connection is through this conversation and meeting, as we do not work or study at the same institutions. Wendy likes writing poems, staring at lakes, keeping positive and trying not to think too much about the future, tipping-points and bureaucratic solutions. She joined the faculty of the ISS full-time in November 2011 after crossing borders among feminist activism, gender and development advocacy, editing and directing programmes for an international NGO and with occasional forays into academic feminist theory and practice. Tara is Iranian-American from the Netherlands and loves healing justice, as well as growing, cooking and eating epic food in resilient diasporic communities. Tara has recently completed studying in Utrecht University’s Netherlands Research School for Gender Studies (NOGS), and is now organizing for social justice with LGBTQ youth of colour in New York City, focusing on police accountability, anti-gentrification and community transformation. Sacha likes messiness, materiality, corporeality, confusion, interdisciplinarity and epistemic disobedience. She currently works  as a research specialist for the Africa Institute of South Africa (AISA), a programme within the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), and as a freelance choreographer. Wendy: I want to start with a story. In early 2013 in an old Berlin lecture theatre full of students, activists and researchers from around Europe, I sat down waiting for the next speaker. I had just finished speaking about what I found troubling with ecofeminism, explaining

harcourt et al.  |   287 how I saw a worrying romanticism that positioned women as being closer to nature. I had spoken of the ‘mistica’ ceremonies of peasant movements such as La Via Campesina, slow food events such as Terra Madre and the speeches of prominent women leaders such as Mary Robinson and Vandana Shiva at the UN Conference on sustainable development (held in Rio de Janeiro, June 2012), all of whom ­assumed a ‘natural’ solidarity of women as caretakers of Mother Earth. I thought of those feminists who could be heard on the streets of Rio, marching for ‘gender, economic, ecological and erotic justice’ with calls to resist ‘the financialization of nature and the cooptation of the UN by corporate power’ (DAWN 2012). Following my talk, the next speaker, Christine Bauhardt (Bauhardt 2013), spoke about her engagement as an ecofeminist, not as a woman but as a queer activist/academic. She refuted claims of women as closer to nature, and the celebration of the reproductive female body and its close connection to Mother Earth. She questioned the historical and cultural constructs of nature, gender and the body by describing her own non-reproductive body as just as much female and just as much a part of ecofeminist struggles to end the damage done by modern capitalism as the appeals to mothers of the Earth. The conversation that followed around who represented ‘women’ in environmental debates was heated. Some of the questions that were being posed in the debate were: ‘Was it romanticism to see women as “naturally” closer to nature?’ ‘Was queering the ecological debate an exclusive elite discourse of the global North?’ Concerns were raised in the debate about whether we should link our conversations around gender, responsibility for family and the environment to queer politics of erotic justice. This exchange has led me to think further about embodied subjects of feminism in relation to discourses around nature, science and modern­ity. I began to ask: why is there a continuing anxiety about feminist praxis around the subject as woman? Is there a lingering res­ istance to going beyond ‘woman’ as the embodied subject of feminist theory and practice? Why does feminism (still) seem to be struggling with a pre-given sexuality, biology, body that determines what is included and what is excluded as the embodied feminist subject? How can we open up often unstated, embodied limits for feminism? How do we deal with privilege within feminisms of varying sorts? As I engage with queer feminism, an important question for me is

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10.1  ‘Ecology?’ (original art work by Tara Tabassi)

how to include some of my ‘development’-oriented questions about otherness. How do we engage with difference? What type of imaginary do we want to create – how can it include grounded and embodied realities as culturally situated within our very different understandings of desire and nature? How can we situate ourselves to be inclusive when we have such very different embodied experiences? How can we go beyond processes of exclusion in feminism and ensure processes of inclusion given diverse experiences of embodiment? And who are ‘we’? Going deeper into those uncomfortable thoughts, I have looked at what can be gleaned from debates troubling queer ecology and ecofeminism. I am curious about Haraway’s concept of natureculture (Haraway 2003) as part of ongoing mediations of feminism on border-crossing and hybrid theories in her work on queering technoscience. I am excited about how queer ecofeminist theorists Greta Gaard (2011) and Catriona Sandilands (2005) use queer theory in order to challenge the heterosexist and essentialist limitations of ecofeminism (Bauhardt 2013). I am very interested in queer ecology but it is hard for me to grasp at times. It troubles as much as it excites me. In engaging in this conversation here I am trying to understand how to go beyond

harcourt et al.  |   289 identity, essentialism and closure in a queering of natures, knowledges and bodies, and explore how opening myself up to these questions offers some ‘possible’ ways for me to understand ways that queer bodies are the subject of feminist praxis. Tara: Imagine queering trajectories of conversations on ecology (see Figure 10.1) so it is no longer necessary to circle back to Western feminism’s subject restriction of ‘woman’, which, as we well know, has often been the normative white cis-woman body. I appreciate Wendy’s call to open up feminism, yet also worry about the language of inclusion. Inclusion assumes an interest on the part of the formerly excluded to join, legitimize or assimilate to a system built upon the fragmentation and segregation of peoples and bodies – feminism being one such structure. How can we, instead, dare to recognize the connections between the multiple bodies under attack from discourse, economic systems or militarism without returning to identities we stand behind for strategic purposes, which simultaneously restrict us? Perhaps we can search for replicating patterns between subjectivities; patterns of how domination occurs differently, much as we follow fractal patterns in river networks, bacteria colonies and romanesco broccoli as parts of larger rhizomatic systems. Patterns, such as Haraway offers, of ‘diffraction – the noninnocent, complexly erotic practice of making a difference in the world, rather than displacing the same elsewhere’ (1994: 62); patterns that ‘pass into each other; they are shifting sedimentations of the one fundamental thing about the world – relationality’ (Haraway 1997: 37). This task calls on us to trace connections that web our lives together and apart – whether they be fractal or diffracting, reproducing or diminishing. By mapping relationality, we can see discursive and political entry points to shifting power and domination within wider ecologies – beyond our own micro-struggles. From my understanding, this is where the framework of queer ecology provides for cyclical insight into consciousness-raising and movement-building without falling into fallacies of transnational unity or essentialism. Or possibly, let us look outside: to snails, slugs and earthworms, whose simultaneously ‘male’ and ‘female’ reproductive systems prove indeed that ‘if you want a queer monument, look around you’ (Morton 2010: 276). If looking around, to trees and oceans, means that we recognize life’s queerness, so much so that queer, trans and intersex

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10.2  ‘This is not a gender binary’ (original artwork by Tara Tabassi)

bodies no longer have to feel the violence of social gender norms, policing and distrust, or be the ultimate body for anthropological and medical industries to cage and study, then this is one beautiful thing queer ecology can bring to humankind! Indeed, ‘nature has liturgical possibilities; its metaphoricity is inescapable, and that is its saving grace’ (Haraway 1994: 59–60). Yet how do we then move beyond metaphor? What does queering ecology tangibly mean, besides unpacking and undoing power relations which construct the human ability to relate with the world around us? What would queer ecology look like in daily life, beyond theoretically questioning binaries or separations? I think about this while hand-pollinating pumpkin plants owing to the local decline in bees/wild insects pollinating flowers. For hand pollination, gardener discourse instructs one to identify ‘male’ flowers whose erect stamens are rich in mature pollen and rub them inside ‘female’ flowers’ ‘ovaries’ along their multi-segmented stigmata. Once fertilized, the small ovary under the ‘female’ flower swells into a pumpkin, the ‘female’ flower closing up and shrivelling: the birth of the pumpkin, ahem, baby? (See Figure 10.2.) If you have ever hand-pollinated a pumpkin plant, you might understand this process as feeling quite penetrational from within human sexual frameworks. How can we use active examples, such as pollinating pumpkins, to expose how deeply embedded human

harcourt et al.  |   291 constructs of the reproductive binary are? From language to the framework within which I rub stamens along stigmata, in the quest of queering ecology, how can we conceive of a pumpkin through the cultural mediation of gendered actions? The fallacies of these human projections are made so preposterously clear: that which makes ‘nature a materialized fantasy, a projection whose solidity is guaranteed by the self-invisible representor’ (Haraway 1997: 34). In lieu of this, what are more strategic arguments than asserting that some anatomy, both pumpkin and human, when doing particular actions with other anatomy, produces vegetable or human babies, and there is nothing more to it? This does not a woman or a man make. However, we need better arguments to counter the powerful discourse of the reproductive binary, and bodies outside of dualism such as the intersex or gender-non-conforming body, whether human or gastropod, do not seem to be compelling enough to shift dominant frameworks. What are political strategies for shifting binary frameworks: for humans and non-humans? Can queer ecology help us? Sacha: There is so much here that speaks to so many central concerns! My first move was to physically highlight in Wendy’s discussion the words ‘women’ and ‘environmental’. I share some of Tara’s desire to flinch at the collapse into  the term ‘women’, and also the pull towards wider questions of embodiment – because this is where the nub lies for me. Perhaps what it becomes necessary to address is whether or not these are conflicting responses – in other words, is it possible to privilege embodiment (and thus, if we are concerned with forms of liberation, lived, bodily experiences of oppression) while simul­taneously rejecting reductive categories of identity? This, I think, is some of the vital ground that queer ecologies open up – the complexity of embodied, material subjectivities and the necessity of working towards a language more appropriate to these. One of my first explorations in this space was through a paper entitled ‘This is not a pebble, this is not a string’ (Knox 2012). Within this, I attempted to create a space that acknowledged Haraway’s ‘myth’ of ‘transgressed boundaries, potent fusions and dangerous possibilities’ (1991: 154), where irony could be embraced as being about ‘the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true’ (ibid.: 149). I attempted to create a fantasy (Pint 2008), a play area incorporating a whole locus of

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play ‘within which the pebble, the string come to matter less than the enthusiastic giving of them’ (Barthes, quoted in ibid.: 40). Thus, what was most significant for me was not the creation of some neat, definable ‘object’ of academia or practice, useful for its ‘applicability’ to predefined realms of intervention, but rather the creation of a space where fantasy and the imaginary moved in rejection of ideologies that invalidate in advance. In an obsession with shattering foreclosures, I became far too Byzantine for publication, but I felt that that experience of devoting sustained attention to confusion did something to me, to my body – that it had somehow changed me in a very profound way. Since then my concerns have remained similar, but are, I think, far more humble, and this has been an incredibly important shift for me. I come from the context of South Africa, where colonial and apartheid histories have justifiably created a lot of anxiety around questions of identity, representation and appropriation. This is a difficult space because while this anxiety functions in response to these histories, I have also seen these concerns operate in ways that hinder or even shut down incredibly important conversations. In order to acknowledge South Africa’s past injustices, identities are often mobilized in very static ways that paradoxically feed into a logic of separation and foreclosure. To be more clear: bodies are often discretely contained within particular ‘bands’ of the ‘rainbow’ that is said to constitute our nation – which does not, in many ways, do justice to leakages, blurs, dissolutions and complexities. However, there is, for me, a kind of ‘double-bind’ here, because being a white South African and being privileged as a result of that, it would probably be all  too convenient for me to simply ‘shrug off’ identity categories. While the containment of bodies and identities within discrete and thus separate realms creates a kind of vicious reductive cycle, other observations made here again point to the opening tension – can we contribute to the creation of less oppressive realities (which also involves acknow­ ledging privileges) while rejecting homogenizing categories? So, coming from this topography, questions that I ask myself relate to how to negotiate these strange spaces. Something that I flagged earlier as being incredibly important for me is  the development of a ‘more humble’ perspective. Speaking about this in relation to  my flinching from the category/word ‘women’, it has  been a particularly difficult bridge to traverse because, if I am embarrassingly candid,

harcourt et al.  |   293 I used to feel that I was somehow a step ahead of that, that I had acknowledged and was sensitive to those problematics, and that I had already connected the dots to see how those kinds of questions were feeding into the very logic that we were trying to unhinge. So, for example, in acknowledgement of the reality of a whole variety of different gender identities and bodies that subvert predominant norms, I felt that it was somehow less ‘important’ to pick apart power differentials between ‘men’ and ‘women’ than to try to destabilize the identity categories and binaries that actually upheld that system (patriarchy). However, with hindsight, I have come to realize how haughty this perception was, because although my understanding may have put me in a particular place, this did little justice to the fact that these questions were, and are, still incredibly relevant to very many lived realities (in other words, just because I had connected certain dots did not mean that many women didn’t still experience their realities as ‘second-class citizens’ or worse). So, this is a brief relation of some of my own shifting perspectives (with ‘shift’ being an important aspect for me because it speaks to the person as being  in process, as something fluid and flux). Wendy: I think you are right in saying that we shouldn’t assume bodies, or identities, and reduce it all to ‘men’ and ‘women’, ‘abled’, ‘challenged’ and so on, among all the dualities. Still, there is a corporeal material reality which makes bodies different whatever their gender – some allow for ways of knowing the world in ways that others do not. Living with illness, living with pain are difficult issues around embodiment and corporeality. I find this a difficult space to negotiate and understand – one that I am increasingly aware of as I become older and my body fails me in ways I have to accept, including the sense of loss and desire. Sacha: One of the ways I have negotiated the space between the importance of embodiment/corporeality and a rejection of reductive categories is through a kind of reverence for affect and experientiality – for the fact that all human beings feel and experience in complex and shifting ways, and for the fact that, for the person experiencing, this realm operates as reality (regardless of whether or not another person agrees, whether or not it can be objectively verified and so on). This, for me, is one way to bring the concerns closer because

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there is complexity, vitality, the blurring of lines, the dissolution of boundaries (think, in experience and affect, of the interaction between things that have heartbeats and those that do not; of the way that surprising things may enter and traverse and blur the body), but also, and importantly, a humbleness and appreciation for individual experience. I feel that this perspective has important political implications because it stresses a politics incarnate. For example, even though a number of different interventions increasingly stress the language of ‘context specificity’ and ‘local ownership’, they often do not consider the complex realities of structures of feeling, lived experiences, cor­ poreal realities. This poses the question: ‘can technocratic approaches/ procedural knowing and the reductive languages that they employ ever reflect vital human concerns?’ This is where I incorporate the second issue we are speaking about – the ‘environment’. Because not only are human beings embodied and shifting and multiple and complex, they are so within a multitude of environments (which can blur the limits/distinction of the body). In this regard I am thankful for Tara’s observations, which push towards a more complex understanding of those. With regard to the dissolution of the ‘distinction’ of the body, I am currently interested in the work of Arakawa and Gins, who establish the ‘historical construction of the human as the singular subjective sovereign’ (Hughes 2013: 83) as incredibly limiting and who speak to the unhinging of the ‘I’ (which allows for more complex interactions and assemblages) through the concept of a person as an ‘organism that persons’. I am also interested here in the work of Simondon, who rejected the idea of the fully constituted, already made individual in favour of what was referred to as an ‘ethical moment’, one which ‘demands that being only be thought in correlation with becoming, the individual in correlation with individuation … through which the ontogenetic process prolongs itself’ (Deleuze 2001 [1966]: 48). Simondon spoke to the unhinging of the ‘I’ through a distinction between ‘physical’ individuation and ‘vital’ or ‘living’ individuation: ‘the physical individual is content to receive information once, and reiterates an initial singularity, whereas the living being successively receives many supplies of information and adds up many singularities. Above all, physical individuation is made and prolonged at the limit of the body … whereas a living being grows from both the inside and outside, the entire content of its inner space [is] in “topological” contact with the contents of

harcourt et al.  |   295 exterior space’ (ibid.: 47). For the purposes of our discussion, what interests me most here is the idea of the ‘vital individuation’ of the living being. Wendy: Ah, just to continue my ruminations on bodies, you raise the issue of limits of the body – and we are speaking about practising and living FPE in this book. It recalls the discussion I had during the research on Women and the Politics of Place (Harcourt and Escobar 2005), where feminists speak about the body as the first environment or ‘place closest in’. Perhaps this is too simple when you are speaking about ‘vital individuation’. Sacha: Well, yes, I see complex bodies as part of complex environments, but what is also important, for me, is that this does not necessarily mean that questions of ‘categories’ such as ‘women’ or the ‘natural environment’ are excluded. What it does mean, for me, is that we need to be careful about and responsible for what we contribute to/co-create, not simply reverting to procedural or well-established forms of knowing. I think that the act of articulation will always be one of reduction (a violence both in terms of itself and how it plays out in ‘practice’), but instead of seeing this as something stifling, I see it as empowering – it means, for me, that we need to be critically aware and that we have even more (rather than less!) responsibility to ‘own up to’ what we articulate. Perhaps that responsibility and ownership are something that needs to be thrashed out more here? Wendy: Let me take up this challenge as your responses to my somewhat staid set of questions blew me into another realm of thinking about queer ecology that is both exciting and dismaying. You are really pushing me to move beyond Western norms of embodiment – how to recognize that trans lives call power relations into question violently, necessarily. Yes, I agree. I keep struggling to get out of my embodied (messy) identity issues – is this a generational issue, I ask myself? – does our understanding of the experience of bodies and power historically determine how we are perceiving ourselves and others? So to confess: while embracing trans representation (is that what I need to do, just embrace, or do I need to push myself much farther, I keep asking) I have also been hugging my sense of being a (cis)woman close, celebrating the power of women (and whoever

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wants to claim that category). Feminism is my ideological stand personally. Politically, it gets tied down in dominant discourses around representation, performance shot through with heteronormative power. Here I am performing life as a (cis)woman, albeit one who lives and travels continually between three different homes, loves whom I love, and refuses to be labelled by those choices in terms of sexual or national identity, even if politically I am. So I am not sure how to separate logic/experience/my emotions/my needs to ‘be’ what I feel (un)comfortable in my skin, and how to avoid that dominating privileged historicized presence in my understanding of others, in my writing, teaching, etc. I want to understand how to link gender experiences with other ‘categories’ of being – where I invite intersectionality in, where I think queer ecology has much to say as the humanity-marked ‘bag of skin’ merges with technologies, places, cultures, histories. You speak far more comfortably about these complex lives/bodies/violations. I feel mired by some kernel of myself that shouts out the need to be defending the category ‘woman’ and then, as I do so, I break it into 100 pieces of difference and get frustrated at my own inabilities to address the lived embodiment of power. Even if there was comfort in what Sacha wrote – ‘all affective realities are real to the person experiencing them’ – I feel I operate in a sticky mix of humbleness and privilege. Well, moving on, I really liked what you both said about environment – thinking about queer ecology is blurring the borders between human and others – and it is also forcing me to ecologize my own life – I am becoming deeply upset by the ruptures in our shared environment and the impossibility of seeing it as shared and changing what is so devastating to lives/natures/cultures economically and politically. I want to understand how to link these ugly times with a sense of hope about the beauty of the world we live in, in the details. I loved what Sacha said: how we are ‘complex bodies in complex environments’ and how to look at ‘the vitality of material things’, along with her warning that we have to ‘be careful about what we create and take responsibility for this’. That seemed to refer to Tara’s pumpkin transactions – and how we can counter powerful reproductive binaries in how we see beauty, possibility and change. We are responsible for keeping on moving politically, welcoming life, despite the violence. What is critical is that giving life has to be untied

harcourt et al.  |   297 fundamentally in our imageries from the idea that the essence of life is found in the reproductive act. Queer ecology helps us to move beyond that in looking at fluidity, movements across species, divisions of cells as life, technologies that show new possibilities for love, healing and living with non-human others. At the same time there is a huge darkness – humanity is fast destroying environments, ourselves and others – militarism, fundamentalism, epidemic disease – climate change – inequalities that deepen, extractive violence against natureculture. I see queer ecology as helping us to move beyond dualisms into complexity in ways whereby we can start to live far more with others as ourselves, rather than destroying what we imagine are others, but in fact are rightly understood as ‘us’. I have found conversations about non-Western cosmologies – buen vivir, Ubuntu – promising as they have been untied from gender essentialism, reproductive dualities and a sense of being ‘other’. Perhaps I am dreaming – again – but our dreams – imaginations of crossing borders and blurring givens – hold promising answers. I would love to know more about your own imaginaries and dreams as well as your responses to my meanderings. Sacha: Wendy – I worry about the term Ubuntu here, coming from KwaZulu-Natal – there are politics to the way it has been exported in a superficial way that do not do justice to the importance of it as part of a complex cosmology/worldview/metaphysical perspective. It’s often exported as something neatly packaged (similarly to the image of Mandela or that of the ‘rainbow nation’) – essentially, it becomes curio. Wendy: Ah, you are right, Sacha, I think that is one of the other issues we need to raise – how ideas travel and change in ways that, once removed from the culture in which they emerged, can be superficial – I hear others say that about buen vivir – I struggle with the interpretations of ‘songlines’ and ‘dreaming’ of indigenous Australian cultures. Yet these ideas travel and mix and move in ways that go beyond just being ‘curios’. Still, I agree, though we cannot stop the process of adoption, we can point to the squeezing out, the violation done to the original meaning (see Walsh, this volume). Tara: I like where we have landed: in questioning where humans have

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drawn lines on lands and bodies, between peoples and identities, that determine how/if people get to live, depending on what side of what line we are born and how we end up taking shape. I wonder a lot about how those of us who feel imprisoned by our identities often fight tirelessly for the rising up of these marginalized categories because, for now, no other way out seems possible. How maps that were drawn before I was born are suffocating, yet also inform the same platform from which I fight; which I legitimize with the terms ‘strategic’, ‘short-term’, and how the ‘real world’ works. In this way I, like Wendy, crave some of Sacha’s humble appreciation for experience. (See also Nelson’s discussion of heroes, this volume.) When I can’t separate out what we believe about who we are, as it is constantly mediated by cultures committed to separation, securitized borders and historical dominance. Perhaps it will only ever be through living, through the fantastically and glittery queer ways our bodies will continue taking shape, that we will embody the implosions of boundaries, binaries and identities in ways that fragmentize them until they mean nothing, enabling us to see ‘what forms of life survive and flourish in those dense, imploded zones’ (Haraway 1994: 61). Perhaps then we can string up new pendulums, which will no longer swing in limited patterns of borders, boundaries and binaries that determine who gets to live or die. What is my imaginary, my dream? Most days I remember that, like all cycles of life on earth, we are just experiencing the decay of our species’ time. As humankind, we have created too much of an impact on our ecosystem to ‘fix’, and humans will simply continue until we cannot any more. But fatalism will never move the minds and hearts of people to coexist or struggle for social and ecological justice. Instead I say that if these are endtimes, we should tell stories (which perhaps is another way of articulating Sacha’s ‘language for embodied relationality’). Stories which inspire us to live in promotion of life: that crack ‘open possibilities for belief in more livable worlds … [that indeed] the world can be otherwise’ (ibid.: 62). Most of my world-otherwise stories during these endtimes (and I choose endtimes as a nonsensical term because, indeed, there is no end to a circle or spiralling cycle!) focus on dirt. Stories from our current endtimes often indirectly involve dirt: dirty; gross; filthy; perverse; queer; barbarian; savage; dangerous; criminal; torturer; rapist; terrorist; monster; crazy; evil. Stories from my world-otherwise focus instead on

harcourt et al.  |   299 the resilience of this mineralled, microbially rich matter; or perhaps what could be queerly termed dirty resilience. Dirty resilience is the dismantling of structures of violence that target particular racialized and gendered bodies as disposable. Dirty resilience is thus also the contextually specific creation of spaces and structures supporting self-determination and collective liberation, such as: land sovereignty; prison and apartheid-regime abolition; new food systems; community accountability in place of policing and criminalization; non-­ proliferation and demilitarization; healthcare accessibility; free housing; collective decision-making; trauma transformation; and perhaps free herbal clinics and rainwater filtration systems. While our solutions look different, they all require common frameworks of collectivity and work towards that impossibly radical vision of liberation, not reliant upon linear or bordered solutions but instead on cyclical and dirty imaginaries. Tim Morton (who, much like Sacha’s circling of everything termed ‘nature’, capitalizes Nature in order to denaturalize it) compels us to write in the dirty and polluted – another example of how queer ecology can serve as a useful framework: ‘Human society used to define itself by excluding dirt and pollution. We cannot now endorse this exclusion, nor can we believe in the world it produces. This is literally about realizing where your waste goes. Excluding pollution is part of performing Nature as pristine, wild, immediate, and pure’ (Morton 2010: 274). Drawing connections between the human constructions of cleanliness and its antagonist, the ‘abject’ (which Kristeva creatively explores through affective responses to the unclean, improper, waste, filth, excrement, dung, vomit and sewage), helps us to better recognize notions of subjects and abjects within capitalism (Kristeva 1982). By understanding the Western bio-political context regarding the valuing of life – as reflected in militarization and globalization – one can begin to draw connections between who and what is deemed abject and dirty, and thus worm’s meat, and who is deemed orderly, clean and therefore in need of protecting or sustaining. In the case of the United States anti-terror machinery, whereby order is claimed to be distributed by militarism, one of those currently deemed abject and dirty – the waste – is the terrorist body; a continuation of slavery narratives of disposability and dehumanization of the racial and sexual monsters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the black or

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Indian body (Puar and Rai 2002: 117). However, while the practice of the US government in highlighting successfully destroyed ‘terrorist leadership’ can be seen in the media, in practice the unspoken number of detention centres and unwritten number of drone deaths of Muslims horrifyingly resemble the unspoken disposal of industrial waste in oceans and landfills with little public awareness and marginal outcry. Again, we circle back to how our societies dispose of the abject: whether that is the private dumping of chemicals by companies; the mass disposal of dehumanized humans in bodies of water or bodies of land by government bodies; or the common dumping of mutilated trans bodies in forests or lakes by hate-crime perpetrators. Where our bodies are put when we die. Where our bodies are born. Whether we get to be old, die of old age and become worm’s meat. These are concerns for queer ecology: our relation with dirt – whether we grow up in cities or rural areas; whether we work on land with dirty hands or have no relationship with earth, finding instead safety in concrete. What are our different relationships with land and soil and that deemed dirty and abject? What are the connections between those living on ancestral land, struggling for sovereignty and stewardship-based revolutions, and those who are products of settler colonialism, globalization, migration, forced displacement, mixed heritage, state or interpersonal violence? What are the disconnections? And for those of us who live in settler-colonial nations or in diasporic and nationless communities, what does it look like to fight for projects or movements that implode the walls assembled around us? How can we defy all identities constructed in order to maintain capitalism, settler colonialism, global domination or national security? How can we defy all notions of abject and subject? How can we embody dirty resilience, and shape our societies in ways that welcome the pumpkin from the soil, into the belly, as well as welcome the body into the soil for microorganisms’ bellies? When will we centre life in humus? ‘The soil lives on humus … humus is just giving back to the Earth what we’ve received from her. And I think the word “humus” has such power, because I think humanity comes from it, humility comes from it, humidity comes from it – everything that gives life and creates our humanity comes from it’ (Shiva 2013). Vandana Shiva’s affective consideration of humus is one possible story to tell to inspire the implosion of the dirty/clean dyad for racist, militarized and

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10.3  ‘Khak tu sare’ (original art work by Tara Tabassi)

industrialized rhetoric, and reminds me somehow of your shared turn towards humbleness, Wendy and Sacha. ‘Affect plays a role in both cementing sexed and raced relations of domination, and in providing the local investments necessary to counter those relations’ (Hemmings 2005: 550). What stories will it take to build consciousness, to inspire movements? Morton argues that the consciousness-building process must include feeling sadness, and that ‘our duty as ecosophers is to take people past the denial, past the anger, the negotiations, and the mourning’ (Doeland 2013: 50–5). Considerations of humus and sadness remind me of a saying in Farsi, ‘khak tu sare’, which literally means ‘dust/dirt on your head’, but functions as a statement of regret or cursing. The history of the saying has earlier roots in the mourning process, for when a loved one died, the dirt/dust would be rubbed on the mourner’s head to mark the grief for the death. In these times of focusing on humus, mourning becomes central for affective cycles of how some bodies have been and are forced to work the humus in dehumanized conditions; how some bodies have been and are dumped in humus as if they were toxic waste; and how some bodies have been taken from their lands, or their lands taken from them. Indeed, the list of that which needs to have an affective response from members of dominant or settler-colonial societies is endless. Khak tu sare indeed (see Figure 10.3).

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Sometimes the world-otherwise story, I tell myself in these regretful endtimes, is that of the carbon cycle. In a hope that one day more bodies will be able to die in the dirt, not because they have been shot in the back or drone-bombed, but because they are old, rotten and loved bodies that we gently lay in the soil: a true feast for decomposer organisms! ‘The corpse … it is death infecting life’ (Kristeva 1982: 4). Stories of a world-otherwise where we celebrate death because we actually celebrate living and the world around us, recognizing that within the earth’s geochemical cycles, whether carbon or water, there are no dead and living, no ends and beginnings: merely transfers of energy and matter. These stories look forward to sprouting life growing from our microbial decomposition, a rejuvenation of even the most depleted landscapes or mournful hearts. What about you? What are the world-otherwise stories you tell in these (end)times? Wendy: Stories for these endtimes. I keep questioning which voices to listen to, which experiences to value as I unravel all the givens that I live by every day in my comfortable existence in Italy and the Netherlands with my pretty comfortable past in Australia and England, and all those lands I have visited to talk and observe. Does it make a difference that I am a biological mother and want to imagine and, indeed, tell stories in which my daughters in the future will continue to embrace life? Or that I have travelled so much and met so many people with different stories to mine that I find it hard to tell my story without being overwhelmed by the differences, think about how little I know, ashamed at the large ecological footprint that is mine? I cry over unimaginable deaths of bodies of all sorts and fear the damage being done that cannot be undone and wonder that I am alive. Yet I have a deep sense of hope, in these types of conversations, and wonder how to link them to my other conversations in UN and academic space. I am just now engaged in a UN Women ‘World Survey’ which has brought in feminist thinking and has been open to new feminist political ecology and queer ecology as part of it. That engagement moves our thinking into another space in ways I find fascinating, in terms of the process and where it can go in ‘policy’; though this is not more important than other spaces, it is redefining gender and environment politics. To quote from the opening chapter of the report:

harcourt et al.  |   303 NFPE [New Feminist Political Ecology] perspectives include an analysis of embodied subjectivities of men and women in relation to environment resource use, access and management through feminist material and emotional geography perspectives … NFPE helps highlight the importance of the performative, intersectionality and identities in the ways in which different pathways co-construct each other and how gendered subjectivities, ideologies and identities are produced, contested, employed around the governance of livelihoods and environments. [And I really liked the last sentence] … feminists have always been the ones to provide the most trenchant critiques of dominant thinking and ways of life, usually from the margins. It is now time to re-claim those margins and promote new ways of being. (UN Women 2014)

Sacha: I think it’s interesting how ‘categories’ has been picked up in such subjective ways. It pulls me towards questions of form, to Tara’s pendulum. Intuitively, I understand the basis of Tara’s abandon, and want to join Tara there, but realize that the form doesn’t speak to what I affectively think Tara is communicating. A pendulum can only move as far as its chain, and this makes me think of so many discussions I have had, so much exciting information I have encountered which nonetheless cuts me at the knees – using statements of ‘this’ and ‘that’ while trying to dissolve them. I often experience it as a reinforcement. I would take this discussion and cut it into the fragments we have all confessed to feeling, I would draw lines (that do not close) between words, sentences and experiences that speak to each other in different ways, subvert maps through disorientation, create ones that defy closure and containment, and allow for new connections; create a different kind of vitality. I would seek to find a language, a form that is more appropriate to some of the subjective, embodied experiences offered. Yes, there would be confusion but the question then becomes, for me, whether or not we can see that as a generative thing. The struggle with that confusion, that active giving, would, I think, do far more justice to sincere offerings of personal experiences than slotting them into dominant formats. This, for me, raises some in­ teresting epistemological aspects – in terms of possibly contributing to more equitable exchanges – and in this, I think that there is already a pointer towards confusion as productive. But do we have the c­ ourage

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for the scatter? We perhaps baulk at such violent ­ actions without considering the ways in which we participate in less immediately obvious (but no less damaging) forms of violence (such as acts of articulation – which will always, in one way or another, reduce). I think that courage has something to do with it because if we dissolve the borders, blur the boundaries, if the ‘interior’ is placed in topological contact with the ‘exterior’ – becoming an intimate part of a landscape that stretches – anxiety, I think, perhaps swells to the question of whether it is possible to be heard across such expanses. This anxiety, I feel, has much to do with dominant ways in which information is processed, disseminated and put into practice. As David Keen points out: ‘academics are constrained by what they like to call their “disciplines”, terms that would appear more appropriate for a military institution … A “discipline” prescribes a set of questions that one is supposed to ask; at the same time (though this is less often noted) it implicitly prescribes a set of questions that one is not supposed to ask’ (1999: 97). Talking about ‘categories’, ‘disciplines’ and some of the anxieties that potentially accompany their dissolution brings to mind, for me, the idea of ‘smuggling’; smuggling operates as a ‘form of surreptitious … clandestine transfer from one realm into another. The passage of contraband from here to there is not sanctioned and does not have visible and available protocols to follow. Its workings embody a state of precariousness … Smuggling operates as a principle of movement, of fluidity and of dissemination that disregards boundaries’ (Rogoff 2006: 4). Are we willing to risk being smugglers in climates of dis­ cipline? Are we able to make this critically informed ethical decision, born through dissatisfaction and urgency in the face of the damage done by inappropriate languages, by mimetic and reflexive policies and practices? (I think it is this damage to which the urgency of ‘endtimes’ refers – however, here again I have a concern regarding form – ‘endtimes’ signals a kind of linearity which I feel does not necessarily do justice to the complexity of experiences – for example, the movements of memory.) Smuggling, for me, in light of ‘disciplines’, speaks to the importance of interdisciplinarity, of creating new languages, new assemblages. Roland Barthes defined interdisciplinarity as ‘the creation of a new object’, to which was added ‘the oft-forgotten qualifier: “that belongs to no one”’ (Barthes, quoted in Bal 2005: 149–50). I think

harcourt et al.  |   305 that this last point is incredibly important, and holds emancipatory potential in light of the fact that we sometimes do not even ‘belong’ to ourselves. I remember, here, a dedication that I once read: ‘To every person who has ever looked in the mirror and seen an incomplete version of themselves’ (Harper, quoted in Knox 2012). This resonated so strongly with me because it has so often been my own experience and, reading your offerings, I would warrant that you have both perhaps experienced this too? In any case, the encounter of the image of the reflection as somehow incomplete, somehow inappropriate, could perhaps be experienced as an overwhelmingly depressing thing; however (and this relates to something I am trying to get at in terms of confusion being generative), I understand this experience as potentially empowering because it means that we no longer take for granted that what we see necessarily correlates with (our own, experienced) ‘realities’ – in other words, we have power and choice in ‘response-ability’, we become ‘answerable for what we learn how to see’ (Haraway, quoted in Bartsch et al. 2001: 134). In embracing this response-ability, if I am dissatisfied with the forms of life that I see (categories and lines that constrain, oppressions and degradations), the important question becomes: how may I go about creating ‘alternative forms of life’ (Papadopoulos 2010: 145), forms that no longer see me being trapped by the categories and practices that I am urgently attempting to subvert and destabilize? When we realize that ‘every social context, every material arrangement, every moment has enough space for conflicting forms of life: alter-ontologies’ (ibid.), then I believe that justice becomes intimately related to this creative act. This is where I’m incredibly excited about movements of imagin­ aries (symbolically as well as with regard to policy and practice) for their potential to mobilize beyond the immediately apparent or easily discernible. I see imaginaries (which often defy confines and reductions) as operating against the inertia of ‘a hard core of culture’, which Fanon argued was becoming ‘more and more shriveled up … and empty’ (1959: 2) – in other words, more and more exclusionary through its inability to speak to some of the complexities we are raising. It is perhaps in this regard that movements beyond the swing of the pendulum are so necessary and urgent, as Mbembe asserted: ‘politics can only be placed as a spiral transgression, as that difference that disorients the very idea of the limit’ (2003: 16).

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Badiou made similar observations: ‘the first thing to recognise about what Badiou calls politics is that politics is always thought’ (Gibson 2006: 81) and that ‘thought is thought only insofar as it repudiates or holds at a distance that which is immediately given us to think’ (ibid.: 80). Importantly, for Badiou, ‘politics always means inventiveness’ (ibid.: 83). In any case, I am becoming rather reference heavy, but I’m trying to point to explorations that have been beneficial to me in terms of working through what is sometimes experienced as the divide between ‘fragmentation’ (through acknowledgements of complexities) and ‘mobilization’ (through specific identity categories) because I think that this remains a critical tension we are trying to negotiate. Wendy: It is hard to move away from other people’s words and worlds. I know you are working on this and it is important to share these thoughts. You have also been thinking about post-humanism? How would you see that contributing to queer ecology? Could that be where we can end our conversation? Sacha: Papadopoulos, in a paper entitled, ‘Insurgent posthumanism’, poses a number of interesting observations with regard to how a post-humanist perspective (one that dissolves the dichotomy between humans and non-humans) can contribute to ‘the making of lively ecologies as a form of material transformation that instigates justice as an immediate, lived, worldly experience’ (2010: 145). What is at stake within this paper are the questions of ‘who controls collective self-transformation’ (Dyer-Witheford, quoted in ibid.: 148) and ‘how can we develop alternative hybrid forms of life that have as their ­effect the worlding of justice?’ (ibid.: 48). I feel that there is something incredibly important, again, about the act/s of courage required to open ourselves up to the fear, anxiety, uncertainty and vulnerability that arise from the creation of new forms which could trump (rather than reinforce) the systems we are trying to work against. The ability to imagine – and therefore create – alternative assemblages, alternative material embodiments – more equitable forms – is, for me, the value of queer ecologies. Tara: No more words, but this image (see Figure 10.4) is my response for now!

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10.4  ‘Queer ecology conversation’ (original art work by Tara Tabassi)

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Kristeva, J. (1982) ‘Approaching abjec­ tion’, in Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection, New York: Columbia University Press. Mbembe, A. (2003) ‘Necropolitics’, trans. L. Meintjes, Public Culture, 15(1), Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Morton, T. (2010) ‘Guest column: Queer ecology’, PMLA, 125(2): 272–82. Papadopoulos, D. (2010) ‘Insurgent posthumanism’, Ephemera; theory and politics in organization, 10(2): 134–51. Pint, K. (2008) ‘How to become what one is: Roland Barthes’s [sic] final fantasy’, Paragraph, 31(1): 38–49. Puar, J. and A. Rai (2002) ‘Monster, ter­ rorist, fag: the war on terrorism and the production of docile patriots’, Social Text, 20(3): 117–48. Rogoff, I. (2006) ‘“Smuggling” – an em­ bodied criticality’, transform.eipcp. net, accessed 22 September 2012. Sandilands, C. (2005) ‘Unnatural pas­ sions?: notes toward a queer ecology 1’, Invisible Culture, 9: 1–31, www. rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/ Issue_9/sandilands.html, accessed 21 June 2012. Shiva, V. (2013) ‘Vandana Shiva and Jane Goodall on serving the Earth and how women can address climate crisis’, Interview, Democracy Now, 4 December, www.democracynow. org/2013/12/4/vandana_shiva_ jane_goodall_on_serving, accessed 23 February 2014. UN Women (2014) ‘Draft chapter on gender equality and sustainable de­ velopment: a pathways approach by Melissa Leach and Lyla Mehta’, World Survey on Women, 27 January.

CONTRIBUTORS

Larissa Barbosa da Costa, PhD researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University, The Hague, is finalizing her PhD on ‘Social movement universities in Latin America and the politics of knowledge: decolonizing knowledge, life and development’. The research aims to support social movements’ struggles and to contribute to thinking about and carrying out alternative political and life projects. In engaging with these initiatives, the research seeks to explore the relations between social movements and knowledges. The study critically investigates the history and motivation behind the emergence of ‘social movement universities’ and what these universities are, do and mean, from the perspective of those institu­ ting them.

Giovanna Di Chiro, professor of environmental studies, Swarthmore College, USA, has a background in biology, environmental studies, and feminist studies. Her work lies at the intersection of academic and community action domains and integrates the fields of environment, sustainability and social justice. She teaches interdisciplinary courses blending women’s and gender studies and environmental studies and incorporates an applied, community-based research emphasis Her courses – environmental justice, urban ecology, race, gender and environment, global feminisms, and globalization and the environment – introduce students to historical and cross-cultural ­theories and methods in the field, and to the diverse social movements and international leaders who engage in social and environmental change in their communities. Leila M. Harris, associate professor, University of British Columbia, Canada, in the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability and the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, works on issues of water access, politics, and governance in the contexts of Turkey, Ghana, South Africa and Canada. She trained as a sociocultural and political geographer, and her work focuses on issues of inequality and environment, gendered natures, and water

310   |  contributors

politics and governance. She also serves as co-director for UBC’s Program on Water Governance.

Rosalba Icaza, senior lecturer, International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University, the Netherlands, specializes in the inter­ national political economy of trans-border civic resistance to open/ neoliberal regionalism in Latin America. Icaza writes and teaches about paths of civic engagement on regionalisms, Third World and de-colonial feminist thinking, and post-development theories.

Sacha Knox, research specialist for the Africa Institute of South Africa (AISA), a programme within the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), works within the Governance and Security unit. She has an MA in development studies, with a specialisation in conflict, reconstruction and human security from the ISS. Her research interests include; critical complexity, dynamical systems theory, embodied perspectives, critical geographies, the politics of representation, the relationship between politics and aesthetics, the impolitcal, nationalism, affect, decolonial and non-hegemonic k ­ now­ledge systems, the politics of intervention, post-structuralism, post­human security, interdisciplinary approaches, and queer e­ cologies.

Angélica María Ocampo Talero, PhD researcher at the Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University The Netherlands and assist­ ant professor in the Department of Psychology at the Pontifícia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia, has combined her experience teaching social psychology with her research with young activists in their struggles for social transformation. She is a member of a CLACSO-funded group focusing on youth and childhood in Latin America and the Caribbean. She has been actively engaged with youth policy debates and in the design of community political education initiatives in urban Colombia. Her PhD research examines the generational transformations in experiencing ‘the state’ by diverse peasant men and women in conflict-affected rural areas of Colombia, particularly within the context of the current historical moment of potentially transformative peace negotiations. Andrea J. Nightingale, associate professor at the School of Global Studies, University of Göteborg, Sweden, was the director of the MSc in Environment and Development and a senior lecturer in environmental geography at the University of Edinburgh (until

contributors  |   311 September 2012). Her PhD from the University of Minnesota in geography was based on work done in Nepal since 1987 on questions of development, natural resource management, community forestry, gender, social inequalities and governance. Her academic interests include pioneering work on socio-natures, critical development s­ tudies and methodological work on mixing methods across the social and natural sciences. She is presently involved in a collaborative research programme with the University of Toronto and ForestAction Nepal investigating democratic governance in the post-conflict state. Presently her theoretical interests incorporate feminist work on emotion and subjectivity with theories of development, authority, collective action and cooperation in common property situations. Her most recent theoretical and empirical work seeks to examine the confluence of climate change and violent conflict.

Dianne Rocheleau, professor of geography and director of the Global Environmental Studies Programme at Clark University in Worcester, MA, USA, teaches and conducts research in several intersecting fields including: political ecology; environmental justice; feminism, nature and culture; gender and environment; social movements, resistance to development, and alternative futures; relational onto­ logies and in­digenous worlds; networks and complexity; agrarian and forest ecologies; urban ecologies; and the commons. She is connected to multiple social movements, from Occupy in Worcester, to international networks of feminist, critical and engaged scholars, to an emerging network of scholars and activists combating global land grabbing, and to broad communities of solidarity with struggles for environmental and social justice rooted in, and extending far beyond, Chiapas, Mexico.

Tara Tabassi, national organizer with the War Resisters League in New York City is currently campaigning against police militarization within the US, as well as weapon industries and warfare globally. Tabassi has a background in community organizing focused on the self-determination of LGBTQ youth of colour communities. Tara holds a MA in conflict, reconstruction and human security from the Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University, the Netherlands and recently completed a PhD training year at the Research School of Genderstudies at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands. 

312   |  contributors

Catherine Walsh, senior professor and director of the Doctoral Programme in Latin American Cultural Studies, Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar in Ecuador, and visiting professor in romance studies at Duke University, USA, is an activist-intellectual long involved in social movement struggle, first in the United States and for the last almost twenty years in Latin America with indigenous and Afrodescendant organizations. Her work is focused on the political, epistemic and ethical project of critical interculturality, and on concerns of de-coloniality, taking as key the themes of knowledge, nature, ancestrality, education, law, state refounding, and de-colonial thought and pedagogy. She was an unofficial adviser to Ecuador´s 2008 Constitutional Assembly and is part of the modernity/­coloniality/ decoloniality working group. She has published extensively in Latin America, North America and Europe.

Christa Wichterich, lecturer at the centre for gender studies of Basel University, Switzerland was previously professor for gender politics at Kassel University. She holds a PhD in sociology and has worked for many years as a journalist, author and consultant in development politics as well as a lecturer at various universities in German, Austria, India and Iran. She also worked as a foreign correspondent in Kenya. Her key areas of work are globalisation and gender, feminist economy, feminist ecology, and transnational women’s movements. She is a member of the academic council of Attac, Germany, and a caucus member of Women in Development Europe + (WIDE+).

INDEX

abject, disposal of, 300 Aboriginal philosophy, 242 academia: as site of power and resistance, 270–5; as site of struggle, 276; as system of power, 266, 278; coloniality of, 280; constraints of, 304; critique of, 277–8; role of, 260, 265–6, 269 academia–community divide, 212, 227 Acción Ecológica organization, 117, 122 Acosta, Alberto, 104, 117–18 action research, 224, 225 Action/Acción for a Healthy Holyoke (AHH!), 226 adaptation: definition of, 193; relationship with resilience, 182 adaptive capacity, concept of, 187 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 132 affect, 172–6, 296, 301; politics of, 164; reverence for, 293 afforestation, 75–6 Africa for Norway (Radi-Aid), 133 Agarwal, Bina, 49, 169 agency of women, 52 agriculture: no-till, 76; rain-fed, abandonment of, 200; small-scale, viewed as inefficient, 80; urban, 88, 93 see also feminization, of farming; genetically modified agriculture and women, as farmers agroforestry, 14, 51 agrofuels, 79; cultivation of, 77 Akwesasne reservation, 213 alcoholism, 120 alternative economies, 163 alternative forms of life, 305; possibility of, 253 alter-ontologies, 305 Amadiume, Ifi, 133 Amawtay Wasi Intercultural University, 268, 281

Amazonian politics, male-dominated, 120 American Society for Environmental History (ASEH), 214 Andes: gender scheme in, 107–8; reflections from, 101–28 androgynous whole, as source of creation, 106 animal protection movements, 93 Anishinaabeg philosophy, 218–19 Antigua, 229 anxiety, engagement of, 18–19 aphno maanche, 198, 201 appropriation of others’ stories, 16–17 articulation, acts of, reductive, 295, 304 Asian Development Bank (ADB), 190 assets: and capabilities, 196; component of resilience, 188, 190 asthma, 223, 233 audio recorders, 266–8, 275–6; as extractive technologies, 267–8, 270; as tool for memory reconstruction, 269 Augustine, Rose Marie, 214 austerity policies, 84, 89 Australia: colonial history of, 241; feminist environmental activism in, 243–5 authority, sources of, 278 authority to speak, 7, 8 aware, as verb, 199 awareness, component of resilience, 188 backhoes, 266–8 Badiou, Alain, 306 Bahuguna, Sunderlal, 47 Baker, Ella, 232 Bangladesh, arsenic crisis in, 172 Barbosa da Costa, Larissa, 13–14, 15 Barrick company, 53 Barthes, Roland, 304

314   |  index basic income, unconditional, 88 Bauhardt, Christine, 287 Behar, Richard, 143–4 being, differently, 57 belonging, sense of, 201–2 Bhatt, Chandi Prasad, 47 binaries, gendered, 293, 296; questioning of, 290–1 biopiracy, 44; resistance to, 164, 171 Bird Ross, Deborah, 241–2 Blockupy movement, 88 Bobis, Merlinda, 165; Fish-Hair Woman, 173; River River, 173 bodies, 266–79; assumption of, 293; complexity of, 296; distinction of, dissolution of, 294; doing worlds otherwise, 272; engagement of, 12; ‘other’, exclusion of, 14; queerness of, 298 body: as ‘first environment’, 86, 295; as space of learning, 6; emphasis on, 167–70; female reproductive, celebration of, 287; limits of, 295; normative white cis-woman, 289; of earth, degradation of, 213; of water, as feminist figuration, 175; politics of, 243; terrorist, 299–300 Bolivar, Simon, 104 Bolivia, 162; Law of Mother Earth (2012), 113; social inequality in, 172 borders, securitization of, 193 breast cancer, 213–14, 223, 256 bridge-building with community activists, 227 brownfields, politics of, 222 buen vivir, 3–4, 13–14, 15, 113, 118–19, 123, 136, 297 ‘Building community resilience’ report (Scotland), 187, 194, 196–7 burden of writers and practitioners, 9 burnout, avoidance of, 245 Business Council for Sustainable Development, 248 Butler, Judith, 50 Butler, Octavia, 50 butterfly garden, planning of, 231 Byfield, Judith, 133

Caldas, Francisco José de, 104 capacity-building, 205 carbon cycle, 302 carbon standard, women’s, 78 care, 81, 85; interconnectedness of, 93–5 care economy, 84; externalization of, 85 care work, 11, 67–100; economies of, 56; externalization of, 79; integrated into market, 87; logic of, 86–9; of women (commodification of, 78; environmental, 75;) politicization of, 86–7 ‘caring state’, 92, 94 Carney, Judith, 46 Carson, Rachel, 254–5 casabe bread, 33–4 cash crops, growing of, 165–6 cassava, planting of, 33–4 categories, 305; use of term, 303, 304 Centro Agricola, El, 223 chachi-warmi man–woman pair, 121 Chester, Pennsylvania, 226–7 Chester Green organization, 227 children, food provision for, 148–9 Chipko movement, 47–8 Chiro, Giovanna di, 2, 11, 17, 22 Christianity, within colonialism, 112 Citizen Revolution (Ecuador), 116 citizens’ initiatives, 84, 91 city, right to see rights, right to city Clean Development Mechanisms, 74, 75, 78 cleanliness, constructions of, 299 climate, imaginary of, 238 climate change, 49, 182–208; burdens and responsibilities of, 216; economics of, 73; financialization of, 77; mitigation of, 76; predictions regarding, 189; risk management in, 191; social politics of, 193; technoscience of, 243 (responses to, 216); women portrayed as victims of, 5 Climate Change Challenge Fund, 187, 204 climate protection, financialization of, 75 climate-proofing development, private sector involvement in, 192 Club of Rome, The Limits to Growth, 81

index  |   315 CO2 emissions, reduction of, 76, 92, 114 coal-fired electricity generation, 223 coalitions, building of, 17–19, 220–1 Coca-Cola, in Mexican anti-hunger campaign, 277 COGERFN community forest project, 145–6 Collective Reparation Plan (Colombia), 269 Colombia, 263–4 coloniality, 102; of gender, 112; of Nature, 105 Comadres organization, 214–15 Combahee River Collective, 56 Comité Civico del Sur de Bolivar (CCSB), 269 commodification, 90 see also nature, commodification of common-pool resources, selfgovernance of, 89 commons, 11, 67–100; enclosure of, 80; interconnectedness of, 93–5; tragedy of, 89, 95; women’s dependence on, 80 communities, in relation to climate change, 182–20 community: emphasis on, 167–70; not equivalent with place, 196; scale of, 196, 205; understood as local, 194 community action, sustainable, 226–31 Community Empowerment and Education (CEE) seminars, 45 community labour of women, 38–9 community networks, as solution to local development, 183 community-based learning (CBL), 222 companionship, 273 compassion, 269 complementarity see gender complementarity complexity, 297, 304, 306; theory of, 57 Condamine, Charles Marie de La, 104 Connecticut river watershed, 223–4 consciousness-building process, 301 Consejo de Evaluación, Acreditación y Asiguramiento de la Calidad de la Educación Superior (CEAACES) (Ecuador), 268

consensus-building, 244 consultation processes, in Scotland, 198 consumption, mass, 92 containering, 93 context specificity, use of term, 294 Convanta Resource Recovery Facility (Chester, Pennsylvania), 227 Convento S. Maria del Giglio (Bolsena), 249–52 Cook, Katsi, 213 Co-op Power, 225 co-optation, in UN structures, 246 Coordinadora of Andean Indigenous Organizations (CAIO), 118 Cordillera del Condor project (Ecuador), 117 Corporación Desarrollo y Paz del Magdalena Medio (CDPMM) (Colombia), 269 corporate environmental responsibility, 248 corpse, death infecting life, 302 Correa, Rafael, 116, 117 corruption, causes of, 145 cosmologies, non-Western, 297 cosmopolitics, 220 cosmovisions, 217, 221; alternative, 6 cotton, growing of, 165, 166 counter-conduct, 139, 144 counter-hegemonies, moving towards, 159–62 ‘counter’-visions, practice of, 8 courage: act/s of, 306; for the scatter, 303 credit, access to, 201 critical empathy, 174 critique and self-critique, 271 Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, 2 ‘damages and achievements’, 17–18 damming of rivers, 169 dancing a new world into being, 217 daughters, unwed, allocation of land to, 41 de-growth discourse, 81–4, 91 death, celebration of, 302 debt, 69 decoloniality, 6, 7, 17, 20, 21, 24, 29,

316   |  index 44, 56–7, 159, 161, 254, 271; building of alternatives in, 176; of research practices, 261 Deere, Carmen Diana, 35, 50 deforestation, 34, 47, 50, 192 Delaware County Alliance for Environmental Justice, 227 Delaware river watershed, 231 Deleuze, Gilles, 51 delinking from corporate sector, 93 democracy, real, 89, 92 see also energy democracy democratization, 84 difference, 170–2, 296, 302; engaging with, 288 diffraction, 289 dirt: exclusion of, 299; focus on, 298; relations with, 300 discipline, use of term, 304 disconnectedness of knowledge systems, 211 discourse, 140, 142 disempowerment, 45 disposability and dehumanization of humans, 299 dispossession from land, 80 dissident and dissidence, problematizing of, 140 divisions of labour, 76; gendered, 32, 35, 42, 69, 85, 86 Dominican Republic: environmental questions in, 53; research in, 29–30 drawings, working with, 273, 306 drought, 75, 191, 239; responses to, 39–40, 53 Duvane, Laurenço, 145 Earth, viewed as anthropocentric, 105 see also Mother Earth Earth Mother Goddess, 135 Earth Summit (Rio 1992) see UN Conference on Environment and Development ecocosmopolitics, feminist, 216–21 ecofeminism, 254–5, 286; limits of, 288 ecologies, lived, 157–9 see also urban ecology economic diversification, desire for, 202

economization of nature, 70–3 Ecuacorriente company, 117 Ecuador: Constitution of, 113; neoextractivism in, 116–19 EDGES project, 173 efficiency/productivity, 166–7; challenging assumptions regarding, 164 ‘Ella’s song’, 232–4 Elmhirst, R., 56 embodied action research, 212 embodied experience, 172–6 embodied feminist subject, 287 embodied relationality, 298 embodiment, 255, 293, 294; privileging of, 291 emergency services: response problems of, 205; scaling of, 189 emotion, 172–6, 261, 269; politics of, 164 see also affect empowerment, neoliberal, 76–9 ENDA-Caribe organization, 50 endangered species, climate resilience of, 191 endtimes, 302, 304; use of term, nonsensical, 298 Energía project, 225 energy democracy, 93 energy efficiency, 225 enough: culture of, 11, 91–3; interconnectedness of, 93–5 entronque, patriarchal, 108 environment: as subject of neoliberal capitalism, 248; experiencing of, 238–9; linked to culture, 254 environmental governance: marketized, 167; neoliberal, crisis of, 176 environmental illnesses, 222–3 environmental intervention, 150 environmental justice: politics of, 212–14; theory and practice of, 211–37 Environmental Justice: Theory and Action course (Swarthmore College), 226 environmental racism, 225 environmental shocks, ways of viewing, 203 environmentalism, divisions within, 8 epistemologies, alternative, 6

index  |   317 erotic justice, 287 Escobar, Arturo, 51, 163, 171 essentialisms, 283; about women, 135 ethical moment, use of term, 294 ethnobotany, collaborative studies in, 40 European Union (EU), 71–2, 145 everyday, embodied and emotional relations to resources and nature, 158 exclusion, 79–81, 289, 305; in feminism, 288 see also inclusion and exclusion, rules of experientiality, reverence for, 293 extractivism, 23, 116–19, 217, 218, 273; effects of, 120; of academia, 279; of bodies, ideas, histories and cultures, 240; viewed as rape and invasion, 120 facial hair, 264 famines, remembered by name, 41 Fanon, Frantz, 305 farmers, women as, 31–2, 34, 51 fast-growing species, promotion of, 80 feeding temporalities of babies, 11 feminism, 102, 176–7, 280, 287, 296; as standpoint of denunciation and relation, 123; communitarian, 121; divisions within, 8; exclusion in, 288; non-identification with, 279; queer, 287; rejection of term, 276; riven by differences, 221; role in exposing hegemonies, 160; seen as Western, 121; Western, 124 see also ecofeminism feminisms (plural), 119–23; communitybased, 122; of the South, 122 feminist environmental activism, in Australia, 243–5 feminist political ecology (FPE), 1, 6, 69– 70, 185, 187, 205, 206, 246, 252; and the (un)making of heroes, 131–56; as ongoing exploration, 57; as site for thinking alternatives, 162–76; as work in process, 17; attempted living of, 238–59; builds on stories from many places, 20; claim of paradigm shift, 78–9; critique of, 135; enlivening of, 157–9; in practice, 251; in relation to

feminist political economy, 69–70; living and practising of, 9, 22, 295; naming and claiming of, 15–16; new, 302–3; origins of, 29–37; positioning of, 20–1; rethinking of, 21; situated view of, 29–66; usefulness of, 160 feminist scholarship, 49 feminization: of employment, 69, 77; of farming, 39; of labour struggles, 88 Ferguson, J., 11–12 field, of research, as wild place, 270 Field-Juma, Alison, 44 fieldwork, 268; as encounters, 270; use of term, 265–6 fishermen, local needs of, 197 five-finger strategy, 88–9 flexibilization, gendered, 77 flooding, 191; responses to, 203 fluid duality, 282 food: security of, 77; sharing of, 148 food production, hyper-industrialization of, 88 forest police, communitarian, 131 forestry: analysis of, 56; in Mozambique, 139–51 forests: cyborg forests, 53; public, defence of, 45 see also afforestation; logging, illegal and rainforests Forward on Climate action, 217 fossil fuels: divestment from, 219–20; in electricity generation, 223; reduction of use of, 225–6, 230 Foucault, Michel, 12, 16, 21, 140, 142, 278 fragmentation, 306 Franklin river (Tasmania), anti-logging campaign, 243 Fraser, Nancy, 76 Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO), 134 Frias, Berta, 32–3 ‘from where do I speak?’, 241–3 full-time employment, 86 furtivos, 141, 145, 146 Gaard, Greta, 288 gardens, English and Australian, 238 gaze, fixed, artificiality of, 273 gender, 30, 49, 68, 105–6, 163, 199;

318   |  index Andean schema of, 107–8; as instrument of power, 111; as social category of inequality, 70; duality of, 106; hierarchy of, 108; nature and, 101–28; norms of, violence of, 290 see also green economy, gender in; LGBTI perspective and third-gender subjects gender and development (GAD), 74, 77–8 gender complementarity, 42–3, 107 gender equality, 12–13, 55; ‘good for business’, 74 gender regimes, 77; analysis of, 69 General Motors Superfund landfill site, 213 genetically modified agriculture, 116 geography of hope, 223 Georges, Eugenia (Nia), 34 Ghandian principles of practice, 47 Gibson, Katherine, 211 Gibson-Graham, J. K., 11, 163, 171 Gilbert, Scott, 227 global environmental problems, idea of, 216 global warming, ‘turning away’ from, 216 globalism, place-based, 22, 252–4 globalization, neoliberal, critique of, 84 glocal contexts, 81, 252 goddesses, questioning of, 139 gold, mining of, 53, 116 good governance, neoliberal concept of, 194 good life, 93 see also buen vivir Graham, Julie, 211 Gramsci, Antonio, 159 great white saviours, 132–6 Green Belt Movement (GBM) (Kenya), 45, 47, 76 green economy, 4–5, 10, 21, 23, 71–2, 79, 94, 248; critique of, 263; gender in, 73 green growth, 70–3; contesting of, 67–100; women’s participation in, 74–5 Green New Deal, 70–1, 79, 94 green roof project, 228, 229–30 Greenham Common campaign, 244 Greer, Margaret, 109–10

growth, economic: challenging of, 94; drive for, 92; myth of, 67; limits to, 82 Guattari, Félix, 51 Gunn Allen, Paula, 50 Hall, Stuart, 123 Haraway, Donna, 7, 9, 16, 17, 21, 50, 133, 211, 215, 216, 239, 240, 255–6, 288–91; ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, 255 Harcourt, Wendy, 1, 2, 11, 13, 14, 22, 51, 56; and Arturo Escobar, Women and the Politics of Place, 295 Hardin, Garrett, 89 Harris, Leila M., 11, 13, 21 Hartmann, Betsy, 56 hegemony, 177; concept of, 159 helping, imperative of, 133, 134, 137–8 helping-out, women’s labour perceived as, 31 Hernandez, Ricardo, 51 heroes: localized, 151; making and unmaking of, 21, 131–56; responding to desire for, 136–9; transformation of young men into, 143–50 Highland and Islands Enterprise, 195 Hirst, Terry, 44 Hivos foundation, 3 hogs, farming of, 34–5 Holyoke, Massachusetts, community development in, 222 Holyoke Environmental Health Coalition, 225 hooks, bell, 133 Horswell, Michael, 106–7 household, emphasis on, 167–7 household economy, 69; externalization of, 79 Huanca, Lourdes, 120–1 Huarte de San Juan, Juan, 110 human, historical construction of, 294 human–nature dynamic interplay, 226 humans and nature, disarticulation of, 212–13 Humboldt, Alexander Georg von, 104 humility, 19, 133, 272, 273–4, 292, 294, 300, 301 humus, centring life in, 300–1 Hurricane Sandy, 230

index  |   319 hydroelectric schemes, communitybased, 196 hyper-separation of knowledge systems, 211 I: in academia, 283; unhinging of, 294 Icaza, Rosalba, 13–14, 15 identities, 170–2; defying of, 300; imprisonment in, 298; mobilization of, 292, 306; public, imposition of, 281 Idle No More organization, 217, 218 illness, living with, 293 imaginaries: cyclical and dirty, 299; movements of, 305 imperial lifestyle, 92 imperial privilege, 30 Inca society, 103, 107, 109 inclusion, 76–9, 289; and exclusion, rules of, 244 Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR), 49 Indigenous Environmental Network, 217 indigenous people, 52, 75, 78, 115, 217, 263, 271, 276, 280; as researchers, 268; changing views of, 218; in Australia, 241–2; mobilizations of, 119; rights of, 116; women, 276 (works of, 57) Indonesia, environmental movement in, 136 inequality, 170–2 inheritance practices, 41 Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice (University of British Columbia), 165, 174 interdisciplinarity, 304 International Center for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF), 37, 49; Agroforestry in Dryland Africa, 44 International Encounter of the World March of Women, 123 International Finance Corporation (IFC), 190 International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) (The Hague), 1, 3, 261, 262–3, 268, 282, 286; ‘Bodies, technologies and resources’ colloquium, 262 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 160, 168

International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 193 intersectionality, 35, 56–7, 69, 160, 170, 174, 176, 296, 303; pedagogy of, 221 interviews, use of, 141 irrigation, 158 Istanbul, protests in, 91 ‘it’s how we do things’, 194–8 jambirre (Millettia stuhlmannii), 142 José, a timber carrier, 141–2, 144, 147, 151 Justiça Ambiental organization (Mozambique), 132, 145, 147–50 Katz, Cindi, 232 Kaur, Balpreet, 264 Kawsak Sacha community model of life, 119 Keen, David, 304 Kenya, participatory research work in, 37–44 Keystone XL pipeline, resistance to, 217 khak tu sare, 301 Kincaid, Jamaica, 230; A Small Place, 229 kindness, power of, 264 kinship, 201; dynamic nature of relations, 150; extended, 149 Klein, Naomi, 217 knots, tying and untying of, 220 knowledge, 182, 200, 204, 243; ecological, 212–13 (traditional, 218); embedded, 269; hierarchies of, breaking up of, 271; indigenous (extraction of, 218; gendered, 40); local, 44, 151, 184 (women as gatekeepers of, 75); need for, among Nepali people, 199; of women, regarding plants, 44; politics of, 169; production of, 270; situated, 7, 242 see also disconnectedness of knowledge systems knowledge about, 260–85 knowledge with, 260–85 knowledge-making, 140 knowledges (plural): of peasants, 267; politics of, 261 Knox, Sacha, 4, 14, 15, 16, 18; ‘This is not a pebble …’, 291–2

320   |  index Kristeva, Julia, 299 Kumar, Corinne, 113 Kyoto protocol, 75

logging, illegal, 136–8, 141–2, 143–50 loving the hybrids, 256 Lugones, Maria, 111–12

La Via Campesina organization, 217, 287 labour, redefinition of, 86–8 labours of love, 253 land, sold for children’s education, 200 land and soil, relations with, 300 land grabbing, 45, 79, 92, 267 land tenure, 41 land titles, allocated to women, 46 land-use: gendered patterns of, 33; practices of, in Dominican Republic, 29–30 Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) (Brazil), 271 landscape and livelihood mapping, gendered, 49 landslides, association with deforestation, 192 Laqueur, Thomas, 109–10 Larosz, Lucy, 46 Latour, Bruno, 51, 239–40, 254 Law, J., 51 Leach, Melissa, Rainforest Relations, 46 leaders and leadership, 150; communitarian, 145, 146, 148–50 Leal, Teresa, 214–15, 223 LeGuin, Ursula, 50 Leon de Leal, Magdalena, 35, 50 Lessing, Doris, 50 Leyva, Xochitl, 281, 282 LGBTI perspective, 70 liberalism, inclusive, 73–6 life, welcoming of, 296 linear thinking, 105 Linebaugh, Peter, 89 Linnaeus, 104 livelihoods: security of, 201–3; strategies, diversity of, 201; sustaining of, 12–15 livelihoods approach, 158 local, 183, 194; limitations of, 239 see also knowledge, local local ownership, use of term, 294 location, social, of researchers, 272, 279–83 Loftus, Alex, 176

Maathai, Wangari, 44–6, 131; Nobel Prize awarded, 46 MacGregor, Sherilyn, 86 Machel, Josina, 134–5, 139 Machel, Samora, 134 machismo, 120, 121 Madeiras Alman company, 143 Maendaleo ya wanawake movement (Kenya), 47 Malaret, Luis, 51, 53, 55 mapping: subversion of, 303; technologies of, 14 March for Life (Quito, Ecuador), 119 Marcos, Sylvia, 106, 282 marginalization, 164; of communities, 233–4; of movements, 8 Maria, a woman farmer, 51 Maria Elena, a factory worker, 215 Marston, S. A., 169 martyrs, 139 Marxism, 46, 49 masculinity: crisis of, 144; formation of identity, 147 Massey, D., 252 Mbembe, Achille, 305 men, African, portrayed as villains, 137 Merchant, Carolyn, 86 Mexico, anti-hunger campaign, 277 Mies, Maria, 50, 68, 122 migrants, experiences with rivers, 174 migration, 200; as livelihood strategy, 200; climate-­related, 193, 206; feminization of, 69; of men, 31, 37; of young people, 199 Mikinakong, 219 mining, 116–19, 170; mobilization against, in Andes, 171; open-sky, 116 see also gold, mining of Mining Law (2008) (Ecuador), 116–17 Mohanty, Chandra, 133 Mol, A., 51 Molina, Lilian Ix’Chel, 220 Mondlane, Eduardo, 134 Monge, Ana, 146

index  |   321 monocultures, 80 Monsanto company, 76; in Mexican antihunger campaign, 277 more, as an end in itself, 82–3 Morrison, Toni, 232 Morrobel, Julio, 51 Morton, Tim, 299 Mother Earth, 103, 105, 111, 118, 122, 217, 246, 287; as collective subject, 113–14 mothering, 86 Mount Holyoke College, 221 Mountain Justice group, 219–20 mourning, central to affective cycles, 301 movements across species, 297 Mozambique, (un)making of heroes in, 131–56 Mt Tom power plant, 223; campaign against, 226 muskrats and turtle, story of, 219 Mutis, José Celestino, 104 Mwendandu, Richard, 38 mwethya work institution, 38–9 Nanabush, a sacred being, 219 Narayan, Uma, 133 National Council of Women of Kenya (NCWK), 45 National School Florestan Fernandes (ENFF) (Brazil), 280 nature, 163, 272; and gender, 101–28; as assemblage of contradictory entities, 239; as community, 221; as materialized fantasy, 291; as mother, 119; as subject of rights, 116; capitalized, 299; commodification of, 72; desire to dominate, 104; financialization of, 77; human place in, 214; liturgical possibilities of, 290; meanings attached to, 175; named as subject of rights, 113; neoliberalization of, 159–62; social, 212, 224 see also economization of nature Nature (capitalized), 110; coloniality of, 103, 105 nature-talk, 221 naturecultures, 17–18, 22, 23, 255–6; practising of, 216–21; research into, 175

natures, plural, rethinking of, 157–81 Neimanis, A., 175 Nelson, Ingrid L., 1, 21 neoliberalism, 23, 67, 144, 158, 169, 183, 190; alternatives to, 162–76; as convenient demon, 11–12; challenging of, 10–12; critique of, 162; in relation to resilience, 193–4; resistance to, 170 neoliberalization: of nature, 159–62; of social relations, 87 Nepal, resilience strategies in, 182–208 Nestlé, in Mexican anti-hunger campaign, 277 networks, 55, 183, 240, 253; family-based, 202; global, exclusion from, 240 Nightingale, Andrea, 13, 18, 21–2, 164, 168, 169 Nixon, Rob, 233 non-governmental organizations (NGOs): interventions of, 146–7 (in environmental activism, 245–6) non-human others, living with, 297 Norman, E., 169 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 262; effects of, 215 Nuestras Raíces organization (Holyoke, USA), 211, 222, 223–5, 233 Nueva Esperanza organization (Holyoke, USA), 225 O, a community activist, 227–31, 233–4 Ocampo Talero, Angelica Maria, 13–14, 15 occupation of public squares, 84 oil: exploration for, in national parks, 115; kept underground in Ecuador, 114–15 Okeyo, Achola Pala, 50 one-sex model, 109–10 ONERESPE organization (Dominican Republic), 54 Onion, The, 133–4 ontological politics, 238–41 ORAM-Zambézia organization, 143, 145 Organização da Mulhere Moçambicana (OMM), 135 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 71–2; Towards a Green Economy, 71 Ostrom, Elinor, 89

322   |  index othering, 79–81; deconstruction of, 69 others, inquiry into, 133 otherwise, 101–28, 163, 167, 169, 260–85, 286–308; living of, 238, 243, 272; stories of, 298; working, 276, 282 Our Common Future (Brundtland Report), 218 overpopulation, concept of, 91 Oxfam-Novib, 145 Pachamama, 14, 103, 111, 112, 113, 122, 217 pachemama, 136 Pacto de Unidad (Bolivia), 114 pain, living with, 293 palm fibre, used for tobacco containers, 35 palm trees, cutting of, 34–5 Papadopoulos, D., ‘Insurgent posthumanism’, 306 Paredes, Julieta, 108, 121 Paris Accord, 191 participation, 72 patriarchy, 108–9, 111, 121, 122, 138, 293 patronage, 39, 201 Pearson, Ruth, 76 pendulum, movements of, 303, 305 People’s Declaration on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, 217 Pepsico, in Mexican anti-hunger campaign, 277 Pequenino, Agostinho Jaime, 145–6, 151 ‘personal is political’, 238 Peru, mining struggles in, 118 pest control, gendered knowledge of, 44 petrol pump, community-based, 196 PhD researchers, 281 Piccinini, Patricia, 256 Piercy, Marge, 50 Pine Gap (Australia), anti-US base campaign in, 243, 244 place: flowing across spatial scales, 252; mobilization of, 198; politics of, 169; understanding of, 197 Plan Sierra, 30 Planet Earth, 239 Planeta Femea women’s tent, 246 planetary consciousness, European, 104 Plant, Judith, 50

Plumwood, Val, 50, 254 pluri-interversalizations, 119–23 political voice, of women, 39 Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogotá), 269 positionality, 282 post-coloniality, 132–6, 159, 161; building of alternatives in, 176–7 post-humanism, 306 power: as a creative force, 276–9; dealing with, 277; definition of, 278; matrices of, modern/colonial/ imperial, 102–6; weaknesses of, 276, 278 power outages, coping with, 230 powerlessness, 278 practice, situated empirical, 140–1 Pratt, Mary Louise, 104 ‘Preparing Scotland’ document, 187 prisons, imprisonment of black youth, 233 private sector in resilience strategies, 204 privatization, 89, 90; of nature, 73; of water, 161, 165 (in Bolivia, 171; in Ghana, 168; in India, 171) production and reproduction, division between, 86 Project Conga (Peru), 118 Project Mirador (Ecuador), 117 propensity to act, component of resilience, 188 protection, concept of, 138–9 protection narratives, regarding Muslim women, 138 public–private partnerships, 72 pumpkin plants, hand pollination of, 290 Punti di Vista community (Bolsena, Italy), 13, 249–52 quariwarmi (men-women) shamans, 107 Quebec Student Movement, 219 queer ecology, 12–15, 18, 23, 286–308; meaning of, 290–1 queer theory, 5, 57 queerness, of life, 289 Quijano, Anibal, 102

index  |   323 race, 280 Radnema, Mahij, 276 rainforests, 116–17 Ramirez, Carmen, 32 rape, of girls, 120 Razavi, Shahra, 86 Read, Peter, 241–2 Reagon, Bernice Johnson, 220–1, 232–4 reciprocity, 218 recorders see audio recorders Red de mujeres defensores de derechos sociales y ambientales, 120 region and regionalism, critical rethinking of, 262 relationalities, 119–23; mapping of, 289 reproduction, social, 69, 86–9; crises of, 81, 84; new ways of, 93; rights to, 233; scouring landscape of, 232–3 reproductive technologies, 70 research: alternatives, 268–70; engaged, 275; in practice, 139–43; multiple forms of, 140 researchers, assumptions and positions of, 44 resilience, 21–2, 230; concept of, 205 (challenging of, 182–208); definition of, 203–4; dirty, 299, 300; financial base of, 190–1; in climate change adaptation, 186–7; institutionalization of, 182; tipping point of, 185 resilient communities, 151 resources: definition of, 185; modes of allocation of, 160; natural, reducing throughput of, 92; untapped, mapping of, 74 response-ability, 17–18, 211, 233, 305 responsibility, devolution of, 193–4 Resurrecion, B. P., 56 Rethinking Rivers network, 173–5 rhizomatic systems, 289 rights: global social, 92; of women, 49; right to city, 90; right to sleep, 91 Rio+20 summit, 3, 10, 67, 73, 248, 249 ‘river cleansing’, 54 rivers: damming of, 169; rethinking of, 165, 173–5 Robinson, Mary, 287

Rocheleau, Dianne, 2, 11, 12–13, 15, 16, 20; with Barbara Thomas-Slayter and Esther Wangari, Feminist Political Ecology, 1, 7, 50; launch of, 52 Rodina, Lucy, 172 Roqué, Hilda, 223, 224 Ross, Daniel, 225 Ross, Laurie, 50, 51 rotation of crops, 33, 39 Roxby Downs (South Australia), antimining campaign, 243 Rural Federation of Zambrana-Chacuey (Dominican Republic), 50 Said, Edward, 133 Salleh, Ariel, 254 Sanchez, Sara, 31–2 Sanchez, Sonia, 232 Sandilands, Catriona, 288 Santos, B. D. S., 51 savage, control of, 104 saving and protecting, 138–9 scale: in conception of villages, 202–3; in relation to climate change, 182–208; politics of, 168, 183; theorization of, 184–5 scales: and interactions, around water governance, 164; shifting of, 167–70 Schmitt, Carl, The Nomos of the Earth, 104–5 Schroeder, Rick, 46 science, relation to indigenous cultures, 243 Scotland, resilience strategies in, 182–208 seed resistance movements, 164, 171 Segato, Rita, 107 Seguino, Stephanie, 76 self-determination, 299 self-help groups of women, 37–40 self-reflection, 275, 277, 279 self-sustaining activity, 250 Serenity House (North Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), 227–8, 231, 233–4 seres puentes (bridge beings), 214–15, 223, 229 shame, experienced by women, in relation to water, 172

324   |  index Shiva, Vandana, 50, 122, 131, 163, 171, 287, 300 silence about other stories, necessity of, 16 silencing, in UN structures, 246 Silverblatt, I., 101, 107–8 Simão, a timber boss, 136–8, 144, 151 Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake, 217–21 sleep, right to, 11 slow food movement, 3, 250, 287 smuggling, as movement, fluidity and dissemination, 304 snails, slugs and earthworms, reproduction of, 289 Sneddon, Chris, 159–60 social movement universities, 261, 273 social security, 88 socialism, 123 socio-economic systems (SES), 185; coupled, 186 soil, conservation of, 38; certification of, 76 solidarity, 85, 90, 240; economy of, 94; of women, 287 songlines, interpretation of, 297 South Africa: identity, representation and appropriation in, 292; water and sanitation access in, 172 space for people to express themselves, 273 Spanish colonization, 109 Spanish Inquisition, 110 Spivak, Gayatri, 140 Stamp, Patricia, 50 storytelling, 230–1, 298 strategic program for climate resilience (Nepal), 187, 190 Stremmelaar, Josine, 3 Stuttgart, environmental protests in, 91 subsistence economies, 69, 80, 81, 83 sufficiency, 11, 81, 85, 91–3 suicide, of women, 47 Sultana, F., 172 Sumak Kawsay model of life, 119, 123 surrogate mothering, 15 sustainability, new spelling of, 211–37 sustainable community action research, 228–31

‘sustainable development’, concept of, overtaken by ‘green economy’, 10 sustaining livelihoods, 12–15 Swarthmore College, 219–20, 226–9, 234 Sweet Honey in the Rock, 232 swine flu epidemic, 34–5 Tabassi, Tara, 14, 16, 18 Tandon, Nidhi, 84, 86 technologies, engaging of, 12–15 technoscience: masculine culture of, 83; queering of, 288 Tepper, Sherri, 50 Terra Madre movement, 287 terrorism see body, terrorist The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB), 73 ‘there are many alternatives’ (TAMA), 10–11, 83 third-gender subjects, 107, 109 Thomas-Slayter, Barbara, 50; with Dianne Rocheleau, Gender, Environment and Development in Kenya, 50 timber, carrying of, 141–2, 147 TIPNIS nature reserve (Bolivia), 118 top-down imposition of policy, 204 torture, 266–8 toxic tours, organization of, 226 trans, representation of, 295 transcendental shifts, 113–15 transdisciplinarity, 212 transition towns, 90 Transnational Network Other Knowledges (RETOS), 262–3 trees, 51, 53–4; defence of, in Stuttgart, 91; fast-growing, preference for, 80 see also palm trees ‘trialogue’ mode of discussion, 2–3, 260, 268 trouble, 6–19, 243, 256; staying with, 211–12, 215, 233, 240 truth: of information, 142; of nature, scientific, 255 Tsing, Anna, 136 Tucsonans for a Clean Environment organization, 214 ‘turns’ in environmental thought, 216

index  |   325 Ubuntu, 4, 15, 297; superficial export of, 297 Uluru (Australia), restitution of, 243 United Methodist Church, 227, 229 United Nations (UN), 252; environmental activism in, 246–9; Women World Survey, 302–3 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), 1, 72, 245, 247–9, 287; Agenda 21, 246 see also Rio+20 summit UN Convention on Biodiversity (UNCBD), 67 UN Environment Programme (UNEP), 70; Billion Tree Campaign, 45; Towards a Green Economy, 71 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 67 UN World Commission on Environment and Development, 218 universality, localizable, 240 urban ecology, teaching of, 221–6 Urdang, Stephanie, And Still They Dance…, 137 us/them divide, 283 user groups, in Nepal, 198–9, 204 ustedes somos nosotras, 261–4 value creation, 73–6 van der sleen, Eva, 3 Vargas, Jaime, 116–17 Vasquez, Maria, 33–4 veganism, 93 village hall, building of, in Scotland, 195 violence, 173, 232, 234, 242, 243, 266–79, 295, 304; dismantling structures of, 299; domestic, 46, 139; ecological, transformation of, 265–6; ending of, 279; gendered, 120; of gender norms, 290; slow, 233; technologies of, 13; used against nature, 264 vital individuation of the living being, 295 vivir bien, 114 see also buen vivir voice recorders, as extractive devices, 13–14 voluntary work, instrumentalization of, 87

voluntourism, 134 Wachira, Kamoji, 44 Wainaina, Binyavanga, 133 Walsh, Catherine, 4, 11, 13–14, 15, 21, 135, 171 Wangari, Ester, 52 warmi-chachi, 121 water: access to, 21, 191, 215; complexity of relations with, 175; declining resources of, 192; Dublin principles, 166; governance of, 157–81 (based on embodiment and affect, 167; hegemonic models of, 158; in Ghana, 173; in South Africa, 173; neoliberal, 170); in-home access to, 172; interactions around, 159; market-based practices in, 160; multiple meanings of, 172–3; unsafe for drinking, 158, 250 see also privatization of water and women, as water users and managers water grabbing, 79, 92 water-intensive crops, avoidance of, 165 watersheds: management of, 191–2; resilience of, 191 we: dynamic, 282; visibility of, 283 ‘we already know this’, 16, 52 ‘we are more than flesh and bones’, 271 Weber, Fred, 44 welfare model, European, erosion of, 84 white privilege, 19 whiteness, 280; discussion of, 139 Wichterich, Christa, 10–12, 14, 20–1 Wilhemina, a community activist, 229 Winter Storm Pax, 231–2 women: active in resistance movements, 171; as category, 292, 295–6 (defence of, 296); as farmers, 31–2, 34, 51; as guardians of biodiversity, 75; as preparers of food, 148–9; as subject, 287; as water users and managers, 157, 166; categorization of, 142; perceived as caring for environment, 174; representation of, 287; use of term, 291 Women and the Politics of Place, 55

326   |  index Women in Environment Development Organization, 247 women only groups, 244 Women Organizing for Change in Agriculture and Natural Resource Management, 78 Women Reclaiming Sustainable Livelihoods, 3 Women’s Action Agenda 21, 246 women-headed households, 31 work songs: recording of, 136–7, 141, 147; singing of, 142 World Bank, 72, 77, 160, 168, 190; gendergap approach, 74; water study, 161 World Social Forum (WSF), 2, 248

World Water Council (WWC), 160 World Women’s Congress for a Healthy Planet, 246, 247 writing about people, ways of, 271 writing differently, 53 ‘Ya basta’, 279 Yasuni National Reserve, ITT Initiative, 114–15 Yinka Dene Alliance, 217 Young, Iris Marion, 138–9 Zambézia woodlands (Mozambique), 139–51 Zwarteveen, M. Z., 165–6